Lead generation is at the top of every marketer’s and business owner’s mind. After all, having more leads means better opportunities for making sales. Over the years, many gurus and experts have come forward with different strategies and tactics to increase leads – from social media marketing tips, pay-per-click advertising, SEO strategies, email marketing hacks and, of course, content marketing.

Many tactics boast different results for just about every other business, but in this blog post, we want to show you one of the most effective ways to generate more leads organically, all while building up your brand and taking customers through the Know-Like-Trust cycle.

This method is called the topic cluster method, one of the newest ways to optimize your content strategy. So what exactly are topic clusters, and how can you use the topic cluster method to generate more leads? Let’s take a look.

What are topic clusters?

In 2017, HubSpot revealed the topic cluster method, explaining that it is “where a single ‘pillar’ page acts as the main hub of content for an overarching topic and multiple content pages that are related to that same topic link back to the pillar page and to each other.”

(Image source)

The model came as a result of multiple changes in Google’s algorithm, which has swayed marketers to focus on high-quality content if they want to be rewarded with higher rankings on search engines.

How exactly do topic clusters help boost your SEO efforts? Here’s a quick rundown.

Why use topic clusters?

• It increases web traffic organically. One of the biggest reasons topic clusters work well for content marketers is that you can increase your traffic using an internal linking system. When readers land on a specific page, they can find links to related content on your site. This reduces bounce rates and increases the time visitors spend on your website, thus boosting SEO.
• It helps search engine crawlers prioritize and rank content. When you use topic clusters, you’re linking what’s called “cluster content” to a main pillar page that contains comprehensive information about a certain topic. This allows search engine crawlers to properly organize and prioritize content when ranking your pages.

7 Ways to Use the Topic Cluster Method to Get More Leads

If you’re ready to take your content marketing efforts to the next level, topic clusters are not only easy to execute but provide long-term results. Here are 7 ways you can start using the topic cluster method in your business to get more leads and make more sales – without doubling your marketing budget.

1. Decide on keywords you want to rank for

The first thing you want to do when planning out your topic cluster model is choosing keywords you want to rank for. First choose a main keyword you’ll want to rank. This is the keyword you’ll be using for your pillar article.

As best practice, choose a long tail keyword that’s broad enough to cover multiple topics but still specific enough to allow you to create high-value content clusters. For example, “social media marketing” is a good example of a long tail keyword for your pillar article.

Use a keyword finder like WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions to choose the phrases and terms for your campaign.

2. Plan out your topic clusters and cluster content

Once you know what keywords you want to rank for, it’s time to plan out your topic clusters and the specific cluster content you’ll be putting up on your site.

Cluster content are individual content pieces you can publish separately as a deep-dive into specific aspects of your pillar article. Calling back our example from before: if you chose “social media marketing” as your pillar article keyword, you can then create cluster content such as “Facebook marketing,” “Instagram marketing,” or even “optimizing social media profiles.”

Pro-tip: you’ll want to create cluster content before building out your pillar article.

3. Create a pillar article

A pillar article will typically have between 3,000 to 5,000 words and is meant to be comprehensive. This is why it’s best to create and publish your cluster content first: afterwards, you can use these to outline, build up, then link to a brand new pillar article page.

Example of how content clusters can build up pillar content using “gum disease” as the overarching topic. (Image source)

4. Do a complete content audit

Just because you’re switching your content marketing model to the topic cluster model doesn’t mean your old content and posts are moot. Chances are you’ve already created several content pieces for your niche, so look through what you’ve already done to see how you can build a topic cluster from this.

Determine whether you have blog posts that can be expanded to become pillar content. Or if you have some highly specific content about a broad topic, you can use that to start building up a brand new pillar page.

Content that used to rank high, but dropped in rankings with time is a good starting option – with a little improvement, it can return to its former glory. Find such pages on your site in the Detailed report in WebCEO’s My Site Rankings tool.

(Click on the image to view it in full size.)

Simply choose Depreciated positions in the Filters and sort the table by the Position column like in the image above. The Web page column will have the pages you might want to update.

5. Sprinkle relevant high-value opt-ins within cluster content

Consider every piece of content in your cluster as a golden opportunity to bring in new leads. So not only are you giving readers a better web experience by linking out towards related content on your site, but you can also offer them added value by letting them opt-in in to receive a free resource, be it a whitepaper, checklist, or eBook.

And because much of your content relates to one another, you can easily increase exposure for the same lead magnet over and over. In advertising, one popular thought is that you ought to expose your ad to consumers multiple times before they take any desired action.

Make your lead magnets visually attractive, and sprinkle them across multiple cluster content. (Image source)

6. Interlink all content together

The most crucial part in the topic cluster method is linking your cluster content to your pillar article and vice versa. You can use your pillar article’s main keyword as the anchor across your cluster content. You can do the same from your pillar articles, or create compelling CTAs to link out to cluster content, i.e. “Click here to read more about the [cluster content topic].”

It’s where the magic happens that allows site crawlers to prioritize your posts and get you ranking higher on Google. That’s why you need to make sure all internal links on your site have descriptive, SEO-friendly anchor texts. Find all your anchor texts in WebCEO’s Link Text Analysis report.

Bonus tip: make sure to try and get as many backlinks to your pillar content as possible to boost your rankings even faster.

7. Consider content gating for certain cluster content

For added measure, you can get more leads to opt-in to your email list using content gating. Several sites and publications make use of this, either as a paywall or a free article you can access after signing up for an account.

This can be particularly helpful for businesses who do step-by-step tutorials or in-depth studies, for example. While we don’t recommend gating all your content – especially as it might leave a bad impression on first-time visitors – consider gating certain cluster content that has highly detailed information that users wouldn’t mind exchanging their emails for. As a litmus test for which content you can gate, ask yourself whether the information you’re giving away is valuable enough that some people may even pay for it. You’ll also want to map out gated and non-gated content with your marketing funnel in mind.

Conclusion

The topic cluster model is one of the best ways to streamline and optimize your current content marketing strategy. And by using the steps above, you can start implementing this method on your own website. Over time, you’ll see your content ranking higher on search engines, all while giving your site visitors better experiences and even added value. Start seeing your rankings rise in in no time!

The post Lead Generation: How to Get More Leads with Content Topic Clusters appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

As the developers of SEO software designed for digital and SEO agencies, we know how frustrating it can be running multiple SEO projects, analyzing dozens of clients’ website, delegating multiple SEO tasks to team members, keeping an eye on customer satisfaction and constantly looking for new SEO leads via email or cold calls.  It’s hard work that requires second guessing your every move.

Regardless of the size and direction of your SEO service, be it a local SEO firm with tens of patrons or a large-scale SEO agency with thousands of projects, you can’t cope without rock solid digital marketing tools. We tried to analyze dozens of digital marketing tools and we have singled out those which would best serve an SEO agency specialist in his or her daily challenges.

Lead Generation

Any SEO business chokes if one doesn’t feed it with fresh SEO leads on a regular basis. SEO lead generation has evolved into pointing to potential clients’ pain points and issues, offering solutions to the same. There are several ways of generating leads for your SEO business: cold calls, email marketing, PPC, webinars, form generated free SEO reports and gated content campaigns. Here are several SEO lead generation tools that will help you keep your sales team busy.

1. MySiteAuditor is a clean and simple lead generation tool that provides an unlimited number of free SEO reports for your potential clients. The website audit tool can be embedded on your site. It allows site visitors to run an audit for a specific page for a target keyword. It has a free 10-day trial and then you will be charged as much as $1.3 per lead a day.

Cost: $39/mo

2.  SEO Lead Generation tool from WebCEO is another white label SEO audit tool that helps you generate your SEO leads right from your site. It comes as an additional feature to your tools package, so you don’t have to pay for it as a separate tool, the package allows to generate 5 SEO audits a day in the Startup plan to unlimited number of audits in the Agency Unlimited plan. API integration can help you collect and manage SEO leads right from your CMS platform.

Cost: With WebCEO, this lead generation functionality comes as a part of any package.

3. Found.ly is a great automated B2B lead prospecting tool that will help you save a lot of time and the effort needed for you to find the public info and contact details of your SEO leads. For now, Found.ly provides a BETA version of its service and you should send a request to get access to its features.

Analytics & SEO Reporting

Choosing ideal SEO software can be really frustrating and time-consuming. The problem with some SEO tools is that they often provide only the what and not the why of SEO data. Another problem is that most SEO tools have poor reporting options or don’t have them at all.  There are only a few advanced SEO software providers out there that can fit SEO agency needs based on the following criteria:

• Accurate and informative SEO data (keyword rankings, backlink data) backed by advice and how-to tips.
• Simple and user-friendly interface.
• Integration with 3rd party tools
• API access
• Regular SEO data backup
• Two-sided levels of accessibility for both clients and SEO team members.
• Easy-to-customize SEO reports with the ability to set an individual scan schedule and automatic email delivery.

Taking into account the above criteria, we picked several options you may want to consider, in case you haven’t yet.

4. Moz Pro

Pros: Where Moz really shines is in having the biggest SEO community. It is well-recognized among SEO newbies and small business owners who optimize their websites without professional help and need some SEO advice.

Cons: Features provided in the Moz Pro fall short of expectations once you dig deeper into the tools. The SEO data is often limited. There is no possibility to track rankings for specific locations, much less multi-location business mobile rankings.  It has no white label access options for an agency’s clients.

Cost: starts at $99/mo

5. Raven Tools

Pros: Raven Tools is an aggregation of 3rd party SEO and Marketing tools which can set you free from logging into several types of marketing automation platforms (like email mailing) and let you see and analyze data under one roof. Instead of paying to multiple providers you invest your money into one proven platform.

Cons: The Raven Tools report customization is basic. It only shows the average rank tracking data which is taken from Google Search Console and it doesn’t provide a detailed picture of your page-by-page rankings on Google and other SEs, while also not providing competitor, local and mobile rankings.

Cost: starts at $99/mo

6. WebCEO

Pros: WebCEO is well-equipped for both SEO jobs and client reporting.

• It provides the most accurate and detailed keyword rankings for the Google local, mobile and YouTube search engines as well as hundreds of country specific search engine. You can clearly see client rankings alongside their competitors. It does a great job in terms of keyword research, technical and code audits, internal and external backlinks, competitor backlinks sorted from high to low value, web buzz and social media monitoring, content submission, sitemap submission, landing page optimization analysis and much more. The SEO reports are supported by helpful advice for troubleshooting.
• WebCEO’s intuitive, easy-to-customize SEO reports with an automatic report mailing tool is a great find for SEO agencies which want to pitch their SEO services.
• Multi-user and multi-level access provides unlimited possibilities for team collaboration.
• Multilanguage versions of the SEO platform interface and reports allow agencies to go native in almost any country.

Cons: The platform is designed for professional use and the plethora of options sometimes overwhelms those who barely know HTML tags or rarely use social media.

Cost:  starts at $99/mo

Compare Moz, RavenTools and WebCEO here.

Backlink Analysis & Outreach

Link building campaigns now take much more of your effort and time than back in the old days when you might ask someone for a reciprocal link or you would simply place links on local directories, forums and comment sections. Today, link building is now a good mix of building brand awareness, credibility and influencer outreach.

7. Ahrefs

Originally built for backlink checking, Ahrefs has evolved into a full-fledged SEO platform. But it still remains one of the best backlink analysis tools with an index of 12 trillion known links.

Cost: starts at $99/mo

8. BuzzStream

Buzzstream is designed for link generation by means of researching leads, sending them customized messages in order to earn links and to track the progress of such outreach activities. The service allows you to send messages directly from the tool interface, enables setting reminders to send messages, and tracks and helps continue correspondence on outreach campaigns.

Cost: $24/mo for 1 user and 30 prospecting searches.

9. Mention

Mention is a great influencer outreach and link building tool. It provides an opportunity to get juicy links from non-linked brand mentions. You find your brand name somewhere and then ask a webmaster to please turn it into an actual link.

Cost: $29/mo for 2 basic alerts and 3000 mentions

10. WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy

The tool lets you see the best backlinks your competitors have, sorted by factors such as Domain Trust Level or social media mention popularity.

Cost: $99/mo

Project Management and Collaboration

To operate, manage and track the progress of digital marketing efforts and keep up-to-date on the activities for all your SEO projects, you should have trouble-free project management tools. Unless you are Shiva.

Here are several tools for project management and collaboration.

11. Basecamp

Basecamp is great for an SEO project management perfectionist. It consolidates team discussion in a collaboration center, a company projects board, along with your personal assignments and schedule. It doesn’t say anything about having an API or integration with 3rd party toolsL The guys at Basecamp believe in karma. They provide their software for free to teachers and students and they give 50% off the price to non-profits and charities.

Cost:  be ready to pay $99/mo if you are not a teacher/student and a non-profit organization.

12. ActiveCollab

Active Collab shows even higher potential than Basecamp. It provides solutions for project management, task management, team collaboration and management, client management, time tracking and invoicing. Unlike Basecamp, Active Collab enables integration with additional 3rd party add-ons for absolutely free, no matter what plan you have.

See how some of the well-known project management tools compare.

Cost: $25/mo for 5 members and 5 GB of space.

13. Slack

Slack is a great app for team communication. It helps an SEO agency outsource work to SEO specialists in other countries.

Cost: starts at $8/mo

14. WebCEO

WebCEO’s Agency Unlimited plan offers Task Management specifically designed for digital marketing work delegation.

Cost: $99/mo + $2 per active project + $4 per 1000 rank queries

There are much more digital marketing tools for SEO agencies and I am sure you have some that you use regularly. Please point some out in the comment section so I can add them to our list.

Start Your WebCEO Free Trial
to Improve Your SEO Business Efficiency!

The post 14 SEO Agency Tools for Lead Generation, SEO Jobs, Link Outreach and Project Management appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

When it comes to selling SEO services, remember that SEO is not a piece of cake at all. You can’t sell SEO like a burger at McDonald’s. SEO is not what one can taste, smell or touch. SEO can only be witnessed in the top positions of search engines, in an increased traffic flow and when the phone rings off the hook all day long.

It would be difficult to build an attractive and exclusive sales pitch of a value proposition of your SEO service, because it can’t be evaluated asap. If you want to be listened to, your value proposition should not be focused on a snake oil sales pitch like a “100 hundred backlinks for $50 only”.  A good SEO value proposition would be the one that covers the solution to a specific prospect’s problem. Remember to keep it uncomplicated, non-jargonized (don’t stuff your offer with SEO terms) and straight to the point.

A good SEO service starts when… In this SlideShare presentation we featured 3 triggered SEO techniques which will help you pitch the value of your SEO service proposition and will provide a good starting point for a conversation with your leads.

The post 3 Ways to Pitch the Value of Your SEO Service appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

There is a term called “breaking the fourth wall” which refers to the imaginary wall between a theater stage and the audience of a performance. Normally, it’s like a real wall because the actors and actresses never acknowledge the existence of the audience until the applause at the final curtain call. But some, such as the playwright who called himself Shakespeare, have been very good at directly communicating with the audience during a performance. This can make an actor, play, movie or TV show very popular. If you watched the “Deadpool” or “House of Cards” or “Fight Club”, then you have witnessed the breaking of the fourth wall. Marketers use this term to show that one must effectively talk directly to the consumer when presenting products and services.

SEO reports are often sent with a “check-box” approach that leads to losing touch with your clients. On the one hand your reports should be well-tailored for customers and on the other hand, clients should see the value they get from your SEO services. Graphs and pie charts with visitor traffic, keyword rankings and backlink quality trends are not the objective so much as the means to communicate to clients the status of their site performance.

Conducting SEO and reporting to clients is very similar to a theater production company putting on a great performance of a true story. It’s important to “break the fourth wall” and speak directly to your customers in order to engage them, earn their trust and make them take action.

In SEO reporting, breaking the fourth wall is possible. There are several customer-centric features built into the Web CEO SEO reporting software. Before breaking the fourth wall between you and your clients, don’t forget to sign up for a 14-day Free Trial in order to see our tools in action. Let’s talk about the techniques for doing this:

Ask prospective customers “How’s it going” with an Express SEO Audit Report

Pitching your SEO services with a well-tailored express SEO audit report would be a good welcome speech to your SEO leads. How can this help you break the wall? First of all, an express SEO report is much better than a generic proposition like this:

“Hi, I am SEO expert and I can help you bring your site to the top of Google. Would you like to know what issues you have on your site?”

C’mon guys, this is usually a giant pass for many people. You will go to the spam box every time. Folks hear such propositions every day. You will not break the fourth wall this way.

What sets an express SEO Audit report apart from most initial SEO propositions is that you are providing fascinating information to people upfront while providing a professional look and personal approach. The report your prospects will be provided with should not be just a once over SEO performance overview. A good SEO lead generation report should deliver a prospect-tailored SEO analysis with coverage of important on-page and off-page SEO analysis assets. The report should help educate customers on the current SEO status of their site with detailed advice. All you need to know is their website URL and the email address to send a report to. Once you express concern about your prospects’ sites by providing real issues with possible solutions on how to fix them, the wall between you and your prospects should open up in many cases.

Using the Web CEO Lead Generation Tools which enable the automated generation of a branded SEO audit report, you can easily capture, analyze and convert high quality SEO prospects. Here you can find out how to generate qualified SEO leads and turn them into your loyal customers.

Break down the changes in your existing customer websites via the SEO Events marks on SEO report graphs

SEO reporting has little or even no value when spikes and declines on SEO report graphs are delivered to clients without the context in which the changes took place at those specific times.

Don’t prepare and send regular SEO reports without explicit notes on the graphs which explain changes in rankings or backlinks. You should take client reporting seriously unless you want to lose customers because of a lack of transparency and poor communication about which SEO actions affected client sites.

The Web CEO Journal of Events can great improve communication and transparency within SEO reports that are automatically emailed to your clients. The journal of SEO events can be used in the following cases:

• Make announcements to all your clients about the dates of Google Updates on the charts of SEO reports
• Keep an SEO diary, describing your own actions in each of your projects, where you can decide at any time whether or not to make them visible to individual clients.
• Leave SEO notes or tasks for your team for more effective and coordinated team work.
• Auto-generate notes about when you emailed manual and automatic PDF reports.

Stay alert when your clients’ websites go wrong

Being timely, pre-emptive, empathic and decisive about dealing with any negative issues of your clients is also a strong “breaking the fourth wall” technique. A good SEO service provider should keep a close eye on the following SEO factors that negatively affect site performance:

• Website rankings drop
• Competitors outranking keyword positions
• Technical SEO issues such as dropped backlinks

The Web CEO Email Alerts tool can help you get you or your SEO clients alerted as soon as a new tool scan detects negative changes in a client’s ranking positions or technical off-site/on-site SEO issues, like broken internal links and lost important backlinks. Once you set up alerts for Rank Tracking, Technical SEO issues or lost backlinks, they are sent instantly every time a specific tool scanning is complete.

Go the extra mile by speaking the translated language of your customers.

Destroy the fourth wall inalterably by speaking in the native language of your customers. Talking with your foreign or domestic customers in their actual language will help you remove any language barrier and save a lot of time and money on translators. Besides, by providing non-English SEO services, you can take control of a new local SEO market where your competitors may have fumbled the opportunity.

WebCEO is used in 196 countries! We have built a multilanguage wiki community with the ability for everyone to crowd-translate our service interface tools and reports into 146+ languages. Read about our amazing Crowd Translation tool.  This tool is available for all subscription plans including the Free plan. You can already provide SEO services in Brazilian Portuguese (99.9 % translation completed), Spanish (88.1% translation completed), Italian (83.8% translation completed), Dutch (73.5% translation completed). View a sample of an SEO report translated into Brazilian Portuguese.

Let’s break the fourth wall together!

We are all ears and we are constantly working hard to break that fourth wall ourselves in order to hear your needs and the needs of your clients. Should you have any suggestions, feel free to contact our Support Angels at: www.webceo.com/support.htm or tweet us at @webceonews.

The post How to Create Client SEO Reports Which Break the Fourth Wall appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

The trends in SEO shift like a clock. Several years ago, internet companies worked hard to generate traffic. Today, high traffic is not a long-run objective and it doesn’t always bring you high ROI. With a new generation of big data players the stakes are high in SEO industry. SEO gurus and internet marketers spread themselves out to build a strong online presence and create an effective conversion funnel. Lead generation is the critical point in any conversion funnel, the liaison between traffic generation and customer acquisition.

According to the SEO survey provided by Conductor, [Tweet “60% of surveyed enterprise companies consider lead generation one of the leading marketing objectives in 2015.”]

What are the most common ways to generate SEO leads?

Now, that you are ready to improve your lead generation strategy for your SEO agency, choose the best ways and techniques. There are 2 well known ways to generate some prospects:

• Paid lead generation. The most common ways of generating SEO leads is email marketing, cold calls, PPC, Facebook/Twitter ads, remarketing. There is also a direct way of buying leads via third-party services.This is the worst technique, because paying for SEO leads is now considered an old-fashioned and rotten technique. You’d better walk on by when you get generic propositions of getting # of SEO leads for $500 -…Let’s face the truth. You don’t know what quality these leads are, how many of this crowd are cash prospects and how many are blanks. You would have better luck with your own,“manupropria” leads than with uncertain junk that may have also been sold to someone else.

• Organic Lead Generation. Organic SEO leads come from organic traffic through Google (Bing, Yahoo!) search and social media channels as a result of your content optimization and promotion. It is the hardest indirect way to convert visitors into customers. Sometimes it works, but in most cases it can take months to generate leads and convert them with the help of just content. You can produce hundreds of posts, infographics and guides on SEO topics with “Ask about our Services” links and forms, but only a few such leads will pan out.

Lead Nurturing as a key part of lead generation

When you go fishing you always take the most attractive and nurturing live bait in order to get a fine catch. The same strategy should be used when you “fish” for leads. Before capturing SEO leads, you should give them satisfying information, specifically about them, that would attract their interest to your offer and make them want your services.

The best strategy for you to generate qualified leads and convert them into loyal customers is to run lead nurturing campaigns. Lead nurturing is the process of capturing, informing, educating, involving and converting your site visitors. There are a lot of techniques and practices of lead nurturing, which include display and social ads, emails, supporting content, online interactions via social media, forums and communities, etc.

How can Web CEO help you easily generate and nurture five-star SEO leads?

We, at WebCEO, have just released an innovative Lead Generation Module that comes as a bonus to our Agency Unlimited SEO tools set. Instead of promoting your SEO services to your prospects through exhaustive cold calling, expensive display ads, annoying email newsletters, you can cost-effectively place our Lead Generation Widget button on your website and issue Express SEO Audit reports even while you’re sleeping.

There are two strategies for the double-quick generation and nurturing of the SEO leads you will get with the help of the Web CEO Lead Generation tools.

Free-of-charge Express SEO Audits

Let’s say you already have some prospects in mind. You make arrangements for a meeting, phone or Skype call. An Express SEO Audit can serve as a good SEO tool at hand that will help you persuade her to order your SEO service on the spot. It takes no longer than a couple of minutes to generate an express SEO report. You will not have to add a new project and run multiple tools at once. All the SEO data you will need, including SEO analysis, technical audit, rankings, backlink data and web analytics will be provided within one single SEO report after one-click effort.Chances are, your lead contacts will understand that they have some serious issues with their sites and they will WANT to order your services after seeing a BOOtiful SEO report that discusses (without revealing more detail than you want them to have at this point) all the SEO issues which keep their site from high rankings.

An SEO Lead Generation Widget button placed on your site

For those who offer SEO services, the best way to get SEO leads is to showcase your potential to your prospects. The best way to demonstrate your business solutions is to provide your leads with a quick analysis of their SEO status with all the issues they have. An Express SEO Audit is what you and your future customer need. Once you have added a branded SEO leadgen button provided by the Web CEO SEO platform on any page of your website in the most fitting part of the page, you will start to automatically generate free-of-charge SEO reports to your visitors which show an overall performance of visitors’ sites via the popup fill-in-the-form widget. Every lead that was captured with a free express SEO audit report will automatically appear in the SEO leads tab of your Lead Generation module. You will be able to see contact details and look through the SEO insights of your prospects’ sites.

Build an effective SEO lead generation strategy with the help of the Web CEO lead generation tools in order to get more high quality SEO leads into your business’s fish net and increase your sales revenue.

The post 2 Passive Ways to Generate Five-Star SEO Leads Using Web CEO appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Question and Answer sites (like Quora, Yahoo answers, etc.) may bring you targeted traffic if you use it in a proper way. Q&A sites were created to solve people’s problems. Your product or service has the same aim.

You should build relationships and provide helpful, authoritative answers on those sites to get more people clicking through to your site and to gain customer leads. Listen to people on these sites – this is the best way to do consumer research. Develop your Quora answers into detailed articles that will really answer your prospects needs. Improve your business offerings.

7 Tips that Work

1. Chose 1 or 2 Q&A sites to connect with your audience. It’s impossible to write great answers everywhere. Choose several sites and build real engagement there; this will bring more results than hundreds of thin answers on dozens sites.

2. Fill in your user profile. Include a friendly photo of yourself, add your bio, and explain your authority to show that people can trust you. Include a link to your blog or website here.

3. Find your niche. Answer questions you are really good at. You should build authority to drive people to your website. Remember to use WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool to identify the most effective keywords for reaching your target audience.

4. Give informative answers. Treat Q&A sites as an opportunity to solve a potential customer’s problem. The better you answer, the more upvotes you will get and the more brand awareness you build.

5. Include a link to your website. You should do this only when appropriate. Your answer should be helpful and a link you add should bring value. Forget about blatant promotion, you are here to communicate.

6. Communicate. Engage with Q&A site visitors. Upvote great answers, follow people who are interested in your topics. Show that you’re genuinely interested in developing your credibility. Stop trying to sell and start focusing on leading, influencing and connecting instead.

7. Become an industry leader. Remember that Q&A sites often appear on SERPs, especially now, when Google wants to find the best answer to a searcher’s question. The better your answers are, the more upvotes they get, the more visible they become, and visibility here means branding and potential traffic.

Let’s start building a community on Quora now – follow me at http://www.quora.com/Helen-Vozna.

The post How to Get Traffic to Your Website with the Help of Q&A Sites appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

1. Promote your best content.

We are sure that you are split-testing and refining your banners and messages in your traditional advertising campaigns. The same should apply to your Twitter advertising strategy.

Tip: Promote tweets that have proven to be popular or tell important news.

2. Have a strong call to action.

Promoted tweets in timelines that explicitly ask people to do download something accompanied by a link increase URL clicks by an average of 13% – said Twitter.

Tip: Give people clear direction and incentive to click on the link you provide in a Tweet, ask them to download.

3. Utilize #hashtags.

Hashtags help your tweets to be more searchable and live on in the Twittersphere. There are two main tactics for using them:

• create your own hashtag and stand out from others (think of your company or product name);
• use trending hashtags and increase the exposure.

Tip: Try not to abuse #hashtags, as #they #may be #annoying if #used with every #word (as you see).

4. Target your ads.

Twitter allows you to choose not only location of your audience, but also to target users, “similar” to the ones you specify and even to limit targeting to specific devices and platforms. The last is really useful for apps and software providers.

Tip: If you are providing local service or products, be sure to limit your audience to maximize the impact.

5. Engage with your audience.

Engagement with your followers is a critical next step after you launch your twitter advertisement. Without engagement, content becomes old school communications. To effectively track and enhance this engagement, consider using WebCEO’s Social Engagement tool. This tool can help you understand audience interactions and respond promptly, turning your Twitter ads into interactive conversations.

Tip: Here’s the shortest and the most important tip. Respond to everyone. Yes, everyone.

The post 5 Short Tips for Twitter Ads (You Can Tweet Them!) appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

A snippet is what we first see in search results and social media streams, it’s what makes us click or re-share. That is why, as a search engine marketer, you should pay attention to what searchers actually see in the search engine result pages.

First of all you should understand what a snippet consists of.

Google Snippet

Title is retrieved from the <title> of the page. It is better to have it 70 characters or less, however now it is often said that search engines limit the length of the Titles by the pixels, not by keywords.

Description – Google uses <meta name=”description” content=”…” /> of a page as a description in a snippet. We recommend shortening your description to 150 characters, because the description will be truncated anyway after 160 characters.

Url of the page is usually truncated to show the search term.

If the found content is verified with Google+, the searchers will also see name, Google+ circles and a photo of the author. Also Google tries to generate the date of the post.

Sitelinks – Google analyzes the link structure of the site and shows a cascade of sitelinks for results when they’ll be useful to the user. At the moment, sitelinks are automated, but you can demote any of them if they are incorrect.

To demote a sitelink URL:

1. Go to the Google Webmaster Tools.
2. Under ‘Search Appearance’, click ‘Sitelinks’.
3. In the ‘For this search result’ box, complete the URL for which you don’t want a specific sitelink URL to appear.
4. Complete the URL of the sitelink you want to demote, in the ‘Demote this sitelink URL’.

Rich Snippet

Rich Snippets are search results with enhancements like pictures, reviews, prices, events, show times, phone numbers, addresses and even recipes. These snippets (aka Structured Data or Metadata) are just specialized code that you add to your site. Google then displays these extras for your search results. They result in a much higher click thru rate and visitors love them.

Schema.org is the home of all the available snippet formats that the search engines have agreed, as a group, to support going forward.

Use the Google Structured Data Markup Helper to generate HTML code with microdata markup included; and Google’s Rich Snippet testing tool to preview your rich snippet. However, Google doesn’t guarantee your search snippet will look that way.

To ensure your website’s content is optimized effectively for these snippets, employing a tool like WebCEO’s SEO Content Assistant can be incredibly beneficial. It helps you create and refine your meta descriptions, titles, and other content to maximize their impact in search engine results, aligning with the best practices for creating compelling snippets.

Google+ Snippet

Google used a wide variety of markup when generating the Google Plus snippet including Schema.org, Facebook’s Open Graph protocol and regular Meta description and title. However, recently the descriptions were removed from Google+ snippets for a page that is being linked to in a post. While titles and images still accompany Google+ web page links, the description has been replaced by the URL of the page in most circumstances.

Testing proves that the snippets with the descriptions are created with interactive posts. Google+ Interactive Posts are ways of adding richer content to your Google+ posts.

Google+ Interactive posts allows you to prefill text in the post content for users who want to share your page, and to add “call to action” buttons that link to a specific URL. Besides it’s the only possible way to control the title, description and target URL of the post.

The post Search and Snippets: Love at First Sight appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

We know how frustrating it may be to find a new idea for a blog post. However, we know how to stop staring at a blank blog page, scratching your head and trying to write a word.

This ebook is the first part in a series that will teach you to find inspiration and ideas everywhere. Feel free to share this with your colleagues and do not forget to share your tips in the comments; we will add the best into our feature editions. Furthermore, leverage WebCEO’s Keyword Research tool to effortlessly identify engaging keywords for your next blog post, ensuring it captures audience interest and search engine visibility in one go.

Click the image below or here to download the full ebook and always have content ideas to make your visitors and search engines happy.

The post How to Never Run Out of Blog Post Ideas appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Do you target a local audience? Then go and check how your site looks on mobile devices. If your site gives no value to mobile visitors, your business is dead for a great amount of prospects!

Nowadays to be local means to be mobile. In 2012 73% of US consumers used their mobile devices to search for local info. And 73% is a strong contingent.

Send your mobile visitors to your mobile version

First of all, consider what is the ultimate goal of your mobile website. You may want a website that will give your visitors full information about your business or a website where a purchase is performed. Once you have depicted your goal, you’ll be ready to achieve it.

Matt Cutts tells how to serve mobile websites to searchers. It’s rather surprising that he supports one of the most popular methods:  creating a user-agent detection at the server level. We all remember that serving different versions of a website is normally considered a spammy technique called “cloaking.”  Guess what? It’s legitimate for mobile versions.

Place the mobile version of your site on a subdomain such as m.domain.com (mobile.domain.com) and when a mobile searcher visits one of the pages of www.domain.com, a server-side 301 redirect will send them to the corresponding page at m.domain.com.

Tell search engines about your mobile website

If your mobile website is located on a separate TLD or a subdomain, verify it In Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.

As we’ve said below, search engines understand that the mobile-friendly versions of your web pages are just that and not duplicitous content that could penalize your brand’s search rankings. However, make sure search engines’ mobile crawlers are sent to the same mobile versions as your visitors.

Consider creating a mobile XML sitemap. A Mobile Sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, along with a specific tag and an additional namespace requirement. Your Mobile Sitemap should look like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:mobile=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0″>
<url>
<loc>http://mobile.domain.com/article100.html</loc>
<mobile:mobile/>
</url>
</urlset>

A Mobile Sitemap can contain only URLs that serve mobile web content. Any URLs that serve only non-mobile web content will be ignored by the Google crawling mechanisms. If the <mobile:mobile/> tag is missing, your mobile URLs won’t be properly crawled. Once you have created your Sitemap, submit it to Google just like a regular Sitemap.

Focus on the functionality

Your visitors will want to be able to do everything they can do on your full site within your mobile environment and even more. As we have said previously, contact information is essential to convert a website visit into a sale. Use tel:  and loc: codes for that. Most mobile devices will start a corresponding app and perform an action, such as starting a phone call or starting navigation. Often this is what your mobile visitors are looking for.

To ensure your site is fully optimized for mobile and to improve your overall mobile SEO strategy, use WebCEO’s Website Audit Tool. This tool can help you check and enhance your site’s mobile optimization, ensuring your business remains visible and accessible to your local and mobile audience.

The post Mobile Website Optimization: Where to Start appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.