Given that 95% of search engine traffic goes all to the first page of search results, maintaining high site rankings is key to promoting awareness to your brand, establishing credibility, and generating more leads and customers for your business.

However, there are instances when you’ll see your site rankings begin to drop. When that happens, so too will your ability to reach your business goals.

In this article, you’ll learn 15 different reasons why your site rankings are dropping and tips on boosting them – by improving your SEO.

1. Monitor Changes in Google’s Algorithm

Google released its latest core algorithm update in November 2024. This update will affect how Google will rank websites based on safe-browsing, HTTPS, mobile-friendliness, site loading speed, interactivity, and most importantly, whether their content is up-to-date.

Updates like these are meant to ensure Google lives up to its mission of providing its users with relevant and useful information.

However, this also means that some SEO techniques that helped improve your site rankings in the past may no longer work. In some cases, it may even cause your rankings to drop.

Conducting an SEO Analysis on your website can help prevent this from happening. WebCEO’s SEO Analysis tool, for instance, is regularly updating its system each time that Google updates its algorithm.

That way, you can find the areas that you’ll need to address and promptly fix them.

A perfect example of how SEO can help your business is Agnew Group, a leading European motor group in Northern Ireland. By adjusting how they optimized their website and content, the Irish motor company achieved a record month of website visits, users, and customer inquiries in January 2019, which led to a 65% boost in leads.

2. Double-Check the Keywords You Are Targeting

It’s not enough that you target long-tail keyword phrases that match your products and services. You also need to check the competition level of each keyword phrase you’re trying to rank for.

If all the keywords you’re trying to rank for are incredibly competitive, it’s going to be more challenging to boost your site rankings.

When choosing the keywords to optimize your content and website, you’d want to make sure that you choose those with a high Keyword Effectiveness Index or KEI. That’s because these are keyword phrases that have a high volume of traffic and low competition level.

Find the most effective keywords for your site with WebCEO’s Keyword Research tool.

3. Fill Out Your Meta Information

Meta tags matter because they provide more context to a web page and give you extra opportunity to improve keywords rankings.

To prevent your site rankings from dropping, make sure that you fill out the following essential meta tags and include your targeted keyword in them:

• Title tag
• Meta description
• Image ALT text
• Heading tags (H1-H4)

There is a way to quickly find all pages where the meta information is lacking: scan your site with the On-Site Issues Overview tool. And then just add the necessary bits of information.

4. Find Your Broken and Inactive Links

Since the quality of your inbound and outbound links are among those that Google considers when ranking websites, it pays to regularly check if any of your links are broken and fix them.

WebCEO’s Technical Audit allows you to run an audit of your internal links so that you can find which ones are broken and fix them.

5. Give Public Relations a Try

Building quality backlinks is not as simple as sending out pitches and landing guest posts to random sites. They have to be established websites, preferably with high domain authority.

Publishing a press release is an effective way to build quality backlinks to your website on highly-reputable websites. In turn, you’ll prevent your site rankings from dropping and may even help improve them.

This is precisely what happened to Shane Barker. By delving into various PR techniques, he was able to generate quality backlinks that drove more traffic and boost his site’s rankings and establish him as a reputable resource in his industry.

6. Purge Backlinks From Poor Quality Sites

Writing guest blogs will help you build backlinks. But that doesn’t mean that you just submit a guest post to any website.

The reason is that Google and other search engines also consider the quality of the sites your backlinks are located. Backlinks coming from low-quality websites can cause your site rankings to drop.

One way to make sure that you’re submitting a guest post to a quality site is by checking its Domain Authority (DA) and Spam scores. Targeting sites with a high DA score and a low Spam score increase the likelihood you’re submitting your guest post and create a backlink in a high-quality site.

What about the backlinks you’ve already collected? Sniff out the low-quality ones with WebCEO’s Backlink Profile tools. All the potentially harmful backlinks will be in the Toxic Pages report where you can decide what to do with them.

7. Know How Your Target Customers Search for Content

Another reason why your site rankings are dropping is because your content is not matching your customers’ search intent.

You see, people go online for three specific reasons. They’re looking to:

• Find solutions to the problem they’re currently facing.
• Learn more about a specific brand, product or service.
• Make a purchase.

That said, the best way to improve your site’s rankings is to update—even revise—blog posts and guides you’ve previously published so that they match any of these purposes.

This is what Brian Dean of Backlinko did. By revising a case study he previously published into an in-depth SEO strategy guide, he successfully boosted its rankings from the second page of Google’s SERP to number three on the first page.

8. Get Rid of Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is harmful to SEO because Google views it as an attempt to manipulate its search algorithms so that your website can rank higher.

The best to prevent this from happening is by organizing your website’s content using the Topic Cluster model.

It’ll be easier for you to find and eliminate duplicate content on your website by organizing content into clusters. 

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9. Double Down on Privacy and Security

Keeping your business’ website safe and secure from cyberattacks is vital to prevent your site rankings from dropping and avoid legal trouble and revenue loss.

While most brands have taken steps to that traffic visiting their website using their desktops or laptops safe and secure, the same can’t be said about those visiting their website using their mobile devices.

One study reports that 40% of website data breaches because their websites were accessed using a mobile device.

This is perplexing, especially since over half of the website traffic worldwide comes from mobile devices.

Investing in biometric authentication technology like face ID and fingerprint recognition is one way to keep your website visitors’ data secure and minimize—if not eliminate—vulnerabilities to your website while they’re accessing it on their mobile devices.

10. Monitor Your Competitors

If your competitors’ site rankings keep going up, then it’s a good idea to find out what they’re doing so that you can replicate it for your site.

Conducting a competitor analysis will give you vital information like the keywords they’re targeting, what types of content they’re publishing, where they’re promoting their content, and what sites they’re building their backlinks.

More importantly, a competitor analysis can also show you the areas where your competitors are struggling or falling short. You can then take this information and use it to optimize and improve your site rankings.

11. Check the Manual Actions Done By Google

If you violate one or more of Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines, your website will be slapped with a Manual Action report, and you’ll be promptly notified on your Google’s Search Console or via email.

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Websites that receive this notification won’t just see their site rankings drop. They can also have their content—or even their website—taken out from Google’s search results.

Google’s Search Advocate, Daniel Waisberg, has explained in-depth the steps you can take to discover that your website was penalized.

12. Refine Your Website UX

Even if you publish quality content and your website looks attractive, if your visitors can’t easily find what they’re looking for, they’ll opt-out and go elsewhere.

Implementing website UX best practices can help prevent this from happening. Here are some suggestions:

• Simplify your website’s navigation
• Utilize a responsive website design
• Create and upload a sitemap
• Make your headers and labels easy to understand
• Conduct usability testing when you update your website

IWillTeachYouToBeRich is an excellent example of a website that observes these best practices.

As you can see, the call-to-action buttons are a different color than the rest of the website, which instantly draws the user’s attention. The navigation has short, descriptive menu titles. The minimal color palette, especially the white background, enables the user to focus more on the copy than the design.

13. Check How Long Your Visitors Stay

If you want to boost your site rankings, you need to ensure that you get your visitors to stay as long as possible.

That’s because the length of time people spend on your website affects its bounce rate: the higher your bounce rate, the lower your site rankings.

Publishing quality long-form content is one way to get your visitors to stay longer on your site and lower your bounce rate.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that you can just ramble on and on in your article. It needs to be carefully written, especially since 8 of 10 readers only read headlines and most site visitors only consume 20% of content on a page.

More importantly, it should provide practical solutions to your readers and promises to deliver what you’ve written in your title.

This SEO Optimization Guide by WebCEO is a perfect example. It teaches you the steps on how to write a blog post that will rank on Google’s SERPs.

14. Check for Issues With Your Web Hosting Server 

If your website goes down quite frequently, this can cause your site rankings to drop. Not only does this increase your site’s bounce rate, but it also prevents Google bots from crawling and fetching your content each time someone searches for information online.

Switching to a more reliable web hosting provider can help solve this.

One of the most important things to check when choosing a new web hosting provider is carefully checking reviews about the web hosting company you’re considering. Sites like TechRadar are great resources for this.

15. After Redesigning, Evaluate Your Website

Whether you’ve updated some parts of your website or gave it a total makeover, this can cause your site rankings to drop if you’re not careful.

For starters, redesigning your website could cause it to partially or entirely go offline.

Another reason is that redesigning your website can affect the way how your content’s organized. How your website was coded will be altered during the process, especially if the web developer redesigning your website is different from the one who initially created it.

Setting up a staging site is the most effective way to prevent all of these from happening.

That’s because a staging site is a clone of your website, except that it’s not yet live. As such, any changes that can be made to the design and structure of your website won’t affect your current site rankings.

It also allows you to test every single update made to your website to ensure it’s free from errors and bugs before it goes live.

Key Takeaways

In this article, I’ve listed 15 of the easiest ways to improve your SEO and give your rankings a boost. Review each point and see which ones resonate with you the most. Then, apply the strategies and tips shared here to bring your ranking back up.

Remember that Google’s primary objective is to ensure it provides the most relevant and useful information to its users. By ensuring each content you publish matches your target audience’s search intent and present it on an easy-to-navigate website, you’ll not only prevent your site rankings from dropping, but even cause your site to rank higher.

Assess Your Rankings And Improve Them Sign Up Free

The post 15 Quick Ways to Improve Your SEO & Rankings appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

It’s great to have your own website. Even more so when it’s more than just a hobby to you. A serious project with a clear purpose to make someone’s life better – I think everybody should attempt this at least once. Of course, it’s a bumpy road with many challenges and numerous problems.

For example, here’s one problem known to every webmaster in the world: never seeing your site on Google’s page #1. With over 200 million active sites on the Internet, it’s always a wild race to the top with no end in sight regarding competition and frustration. Unless you know what you are doing, you will be struggling to get any user traffic at all, let alone turn it into anything profitable.

But what if you are doing everything you can and somebody else is still ahead of you? Why, if they insist on getting in your way…

This means war!

And wars begin with collecting information. In this case, SEO intel.

SEO competitor analysis can be used to rob your opponent of all the spoils: rankings, user traffic, even conversions. And the more thoroughly you research your competition, the better the results. Let’s see how you can analyze them and what you can do with all the information you’ve obtained.

1. Perform a SWOT analysis

Before you take on your Internet rivals, turn your attention to your current state of affairs. There are sites out there which are your competitors, and you are theirs. How good of a competitor are you right now? And how well are you prepared for fighting someone who’s bigger than you are?

Just like a shopping trip starts with checking the contents of your wallet, so should you check what your own site has to offer. Self-reflection for sites is sometimes called a SWOT analysis.

What’s in a SWOT analysis?

• Strengths: all the things you are currently good at. For example, your site may have an awesome design that impresses your visitors.
• Weaknesses: all the things you are supposed to be good at, but are not. Do you notice that users largely ignore your calls-to-action? That is definitely something to worry about.
• Opportunities: all the things that you could use for your site’s benefit right now or in the near future. Are any big holidays coming soon? They are always a good opportunity to lure in more customers with special offers and juicy discounts.
• Threats: all the things that are or may become present in the environment and could hurt your site. Threats are external, unlike weaknesses which are innate.

For example, a thorough check might reveal that your site is a charm to use thanks to its efficient design and fast loading speed. But on the other hand, it may lack interesting content that would appeal to users. Or you might find out that your hosting is about to expire and soon you won’t have a website anymore.

The possibilities are endless here. The realities, however, are not. Find out as much as you can about your reality – it will serve as the basis of your SEO strategy.

2. Find your direct competitors

Now we can move on to competitor research. First things first, you need to know who, exactly, you are competing with. Look for sites which:

• Target the same audience as you;
• Rank in search engines for your keywords higher than you.

Feel free to ignore the sites which don’t fit this description – they are not your competition. Waste your time on them, and your competitor SEO strategy will become harder for no good reason. Focus only on the pests leeching off of your traffic. Soon, very soon, the tables will turn…

But that’s only after you find them.

To start, boot up the Dangerous Competitors tool in WebCEO.

And click on Settings to begin.

1. Enter your ranking keywords in the Keywords tab.

2. Click on the Search engines tab, then click on the Add a search engine button. In the new popup window, select your target country and language. The tool will find relevant search engines, from which you’ll need to choose those that are relevant to your situation (Google and Google Mobile, most likely). Press Add.

Click on Save, and the Rank Tracker tool will begin searching. Once it’s finished, it will generate a graph and a table.

Look for the websites we determine to have a higher traffic score than you (they will be above you in the table). You should pay them a visit to make sure they actually share a niche with you and are competing for the same users. Once you determine a site is your competitor, find it in the table and click on the flag next to its name. This will automatically add this website as a competitor in Settings.

In Settings/Competitors you can type in other competitors’ URLs. WebCEO will be able to show data for them in its other reports.

One more pro tip: to best hone in on your real competitors, filter your keyword list for words that most directly state what you do. For example: “Cleveland marketing agency” as opposed to “marketing agency” or “Cleveland marketing”.

You can use tags to designate the words that most exactly state the business you are in. In this way you can weed out websites for business journals and college marketing courses or marketing agencies in, say, Cincinnati, all of which are not your competitors.

3. Analyze the user experience on their sites

Okay, you have a list of your competitors. Now let’s start with the easiest part of competitor SEO: visual analysis. Time to spy with your little eye all their weak spots! …Although, it’s more likely you will end up unearthing your own.

What should you do when you visit their sites? Start from their homepages and see where it takes you.

• Compare their site designs to yours. First impressions matter; users will be more willing to browse a site that’s easy on the eyes. Which of your competitors look better than you and how do they do it? What do they have in the looks department that you don’t?
• Check how secure they are. Are their sites HTTP or HTTPS? Do they use cookies? Do they redirect you anywhere suspicious or load any dubious popup windows? Or, here’s a simple test you can use as a rule of thumb: would you trust those sites with your own credit card information?
• Test their loading speed. You can use your browser’s in-built tools like Chrome’s DevTools to measure it, but you should be able to get a good grasp of it even without counting milliseconds. If it’s fast, it’s fast.
• Test their navigation. Do they have it to begin with? If they do, what pages can you visit from there? Does it link to all the important pages users would need to visit (such as contact information)? Is it easy to navigate on PCs, smartphones and other devices?
• Check them for intrusive interstitials. Do any ads or banners appear and block the view or otherwise distract visitors from the main content?
• Check their pricing plans and other terms of use. How do they compare to what you are offering? Between you and them, whom would the users rather choose?
• Check their calls-to-action. Do they look clickable and compelling? Do they give users what they want in as few steps as possible?

If this brief analysis reveals why your competitors are better than you, don’t get depressed. Sites rise in rankings by changing for the better, and you can do the same after a little brainstorming. Take your time and turn your weaknesses into strengths one by one.

4. Plan your content strategy

Users of Google only care about solutions to their problems. Whether the first thing they see is a featured snippet or an organic result is of no concern to them. They will be fine with either as long as it promises help.

As a site owner, it’s up to you where you want to rank. But if you want traffic, then your solutions must be better and more available than anybody else’s.

In other words, it all boils down to content and how to present it.

How to make your content competitive?

1. Satisfy user search intent. Anticipate every question, want and pain you can think of – then address them all.
2. Make your content superior to everything you can find for your keywords on Google’s first page.
3. Optimize your search snippets to be eye-catching and clickable. This means a readable and uncropped title, description and URL, using power words. Enhance your snippets with structured data.
4. Optimize your content to be featured at Position Zero.

Next comes the harder and more thankless part: promoting your content.

You will need to find people who link to content like yours, then make them notice you. This is much easier done when you have already spent plenty of time growing your online presence and building a network. Starting fresh will be a pain. Whichever is the case for you, the first step will be the same: making a list of potential backlink donors.

Time for the Competitor Backlink Spy to shine! Look for sites which have linked to your competitors’ content.

Once you have a list of suitable candidates, you can start building backlinks on their sites. Or rather, start trying to. It’s very unlikely that all or even many of them will agree to work with you, but keep doing your best.

To be more specific:

• Reach out to as many sites as you can. Your success rate is going to be low, so you will need to cast a wide net. It will increase your chances if two or more of your competitors have a link from a particular website, of course.
• Prepare multiple different email templates for outreach. Don’t send everyone the same text; what if it turns out so bad that you get no backlinks at all? Use a variety of approaches and keep improving.
• Mention why linking to your site is a good idea. What benefits are there for the donor? For example, your piece of content could be really unique or more in-depth than others on the same topic. Or maybe you found a broken link on their site and your content is a good replacement.

5. Analyze competitors’ keywords

If your competitor has keywords for which they are already ranking high, it’s going to be hard to outrank them for the same keywords. Not impossible, but still hard. You will need to increase your site’s authority significantly for that to work, and only high-DA backlinks can do the trick.

Getting such backlinks should be your goal, but your initial efforts would be better off spent elsewhere. There are easier and faster ways to shorten the distance between you and your competitors. You might even end up overtaking them sooner than you think!

For starters, find out how they are ranking for the keywords you are using yourself. This can be checked in the report called Competitor Rankings by Keyword.

If it turns out you are already outranking your competitors for some of your keywords, that’s great! Of course, it could also mean you should find somebody else to compete against in order to achieve better results. But let’s assume that’s not the case at the moment.

Search the table for the keywords which fulfil both of these conditions:

• You aren’t ranking well for them;
• Your competitors aren’t ranking well for them, either.

Why those keywords? Because it’s easier to overtake pages that don’t rank well. If you double-down on those specific keywords and improve your own rankings, you can steal a nice chunk of user traffic your competitors would want for themselves.

Be sure to check the rankings in search engines other than Google, as your competition’s rankings might be weak there as well. You can find this information in a different report: Competitor Rankings by Search Engine.

Another tool you should try is WebCEO’s Competitor Keyword Spy (better known as Spy on Competitors). As the name suggests, this tool shows you the keywords used on your competitors’ sites. What’s the best way to use it?

1. Enter a competing website’s URL and press Search. The tool will show the keywords in a table.

2. Find the keywords you’d like to use yourself. Add them to your keyword basket by clicking on the “+” next to them. If they are already in your basket, that’s good.

3. Go back to the Competitor Rankings by Keyword report. Run a rescan to see the rankings for the keywords you’ve just added.

4. And just like before, find the keywords for which your competitors aren’t ranking well. You already know what to do with them.

6. Analyze their backlinks

It’s hard to imagine competitor SEO analysis without looking up their backlinks. It’s one of the best ways to build your own links, after all – and one of the main reasons to analyze your competitors in the first place.

Allow me to recommend the tool for the job. The name is Spy. Backlink Spy.

Open its Settings and feed it your competitors’ domain names. Press Save, and the tool will generate a table with this information:

• Pages with each competitor’s backlinks
• Pages with your own backlinks
• Each backlink’s Domain Trust Flow
• Anchor texts

Some of the sites that link to your competitors may already be linking to you as well. So the main point of interest in this table is the backlinks more than one of your competitors have, but you don’t have. It’s also a good idea to check the backlinks sporting the highest Domain Trust Flow. Sort the table by that column and check the sites where your site doesn’t have a backlink.

It also helps to track your progress by marking up the sites you are trying to butter up. The table’s rightmost column is reserved for your own site and its backlinks. Unlike competitor sites, your empty fields aren’t exactly empty; they have dropdown menus where you can associate a status with the current or potential backlink donor. For example, you can choose Rejected if you failed to negotiate a backlink.

Be sure to check up on your competitors’ backlinks every now and then. There’s no way to tell when they will get backlinks from more sites you could get for yourself, and you won’t know until you run a check. Use the Scan Schedule feature to have the tool do it for you automatically – for example, once a month.

7. Check their social media activity

It’s arguable how much social media activity helps to boost your rankings. But that doesn’t mean you can just write it off as undeserving of your time. Where social media lacks in supporting your SEO, it shines at building reputations online – and for a brand, reputation is everything.

So if your competitors have pages in social media where they keep in touch with their users, not only do you need to follow their example, you should also watch how they do it. Assuming they are good at it, of course.

Check their social media activity for these things:

• What kind of content do they post? It could be advertising content on their sites, making announcements, asking for feedback or anything else. If your competitors communicate with their users in a manner that you don’t, take note.
• How often do they post? This is most often directly tied to how much content they have to share, but not always. The question is, can you match or surpass the frequency of their updates?
• Do their posts naturally spur you to take some sort of action, such as leave a reply or share? In other words, are their posts engaging? This applies to everything in a post: text, images and calls-to-action where they openly ask you to like, share or buy.
• How much engagement do they get? Likes, upvotes, shares, retweets, comments – everything counts. These signals demonstrate a post’s ability to provoke a response from users who ignore most of what they find online, so it’s a metric you can trust. Use a tool like Competitor Social Citations to track this metric.

As with your competitors’ actual sites, the purpose of their social media pages’ visual analysis is to figure out what they do better than you do. Seeing with your own eyes what works is the best way to find inspiration and start creating your own high-quality content.

8. Evaluate their online reputation

Of course, checking keyword rankings and site traffic aren’t the only ways to tell if your competitor is good. You don’t even need to touch any SEO tools for that if you just listen to what people say. If you hear things like “They are fantastic, I’m their regular!”, then you can be sure their website is a force to be reckoned with.

So, which one of your rivals is the most popular? If you don’t know yet, or if you want to do a more thorough check, there are lots of ways to find user feedback.

• Review platforms. User reviews are often very detailed, which is why they are the best way to analyze a brand’s reputation (and why it’s always recommended to get as many positive reviews as you can).
• Comment sections. If your competitors have these on their sites, it’s also worth checking how they respond to their commenters.
• Brand mentions. They can be easily tracked with free tools, such as Google Alerts (which will be sent to you by email) or WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring (same as Google Alerts, plus mentions from Twitter).

How does all this help you? Some brands are more popular with their audience than others. Not everybody’s reputation is on the same level – and that is what you are going to exploit. Just like with Google rankings and site traffic, it will be easier to “overtake” competitors whose reputation isn’t that hot.

By making a name for yourself, you will be killing two birds with one stone: you’ll shorten the distance between you and your biggest competitors, and you will leave others in the dust.

9. Engage with their audience

If you aren’t fighting dirty, you aren’t actually trying to win. Strike your competition where they least expect it!

Seriously, you couldn’t think of an easier way to steal your competitors’ audience if you tried. Why wait for them to come to your site when you can make the first move? Find the places where they hang out often and engage with them there, both online and offline:

• Social media
• Blogs and forums
• Review sites
• Comment sections
• Networking events

10. Find out what tools and plugins they are using on their sites

Plugins can be found almost everywhere. Why are they so popular? If you are a webmaster, you will likely want to add a few features for your site, but you might lack the time (or knowledge) to code them with your own hands. And from a user’s perspective, plugins often enhance UX, which is another good reason to use them.

So you can expect that your competitors will be relying on plugins themselves. And if they are, it will help you to know:

• What plugins are your competitors using?
• What do those plugins do? Do they perform tasks you may want on your own site?
• Are there better alternatives to those plugins that you could use?

You can use BuiltWith, a free Chrome browser extension, to scan your competitors’ sites for the plugins and tools they use.

Summary

As you can see, competitor SEO is a complex task with a lot of steps. But no matter how hard it can get, the first step is always the same: analyzing your current SEO situation. Overall site quality, rankings, traffic, backlinks and online presence.

So give your site a thorough check now. See how you are doing against your current online competitors – and then find more of them to overcome.

The post SEO Competitor Analysis: Moving Up the Food Chain in 10 Steps appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Business owners and bloggers, veteran marketers and greenhorns – everyone is eventually overcome with the desire to step outside of their boundaries. Sometimes the step they make is larger than usual, and they decide to go global. They look at another country on the map and think to themselves, “Look at all those people who don’t know yet that they love what I have to offer!” And then they start working on earning that admiration.

Can you relate? If you are an ambitious Internet marketer and are interested in global SEO, then this post is for you. In order to give you a helping hand, we have prepared a number of dos and don’ts to heed for a successful international SEO strategy.

What benefits does international SEO have?

Obvious rewards for expanding over to other countries include:

• New customers
• Greater profits
• More backlinks and traffic
• Higher rankings for your site

Then there are more interesting upsides that might not be as obvious.

• You can find less costly opportunities for your business. Prices aren’t the same in different countries; you may stumble upon a cheaper and less competitive market. Your competitors may never have thought of even trying to compete in another market such as for those who expect a product or at least its packaging to appear in their language. In fact, this could be the main factor in how you choose a country to target.
• More customers mean more feedback. A pool of new ideas for improving your business could be waiting for you.

There are two ways to approach international SEO:

1. Launch a campaign aimed at another country and
2. Launch a campaign aimed at an audience speaking a different language in your own country.

These ideas are similar in many ways, but there’s less work to do with the latter. Once you’ve finished reading the list below, it will become apparent which steps you can skip (and which you can’t do without). Let’s begin. 

1. Choose the right URL structure for you

It shouldn’t be a secret to you that country-specific top-level domains (like .uk, .de, .fr) are a thing. This should be enough of a clue that a site’s URL can be a significant part of an international SEO strategy. And indeed it is. There are several different URL structures to choose from, and not all of them may be helpful to you, so choose wisely!

Here are your options:

• A country code top-level domain, or ccTLD (e.g. example.de). It’s the easiest way to rank locally, and you won’t have to worry about a strain on your crawl budget, but it’s a separate domain that will have to compete for rankings with your primary site. It can also be costly. Recommended for brands which already have a strong online presence and will easily attract a new audience.
• A different domain (e.g. examplede.com). It may be cheaper than a ccTLD, but it won’t rank locally as well and it will compete with your primary site. On the other hand, your crawl budget won’t complain.
• A subdomain (e.g. de.example.com). It’s easier to maintain than a ccTLD, but the flow of link equity to and from the root domain might not go smoothly.
• A subdirectory (e.g. example.com/de). All internationalized content is placed in a subfolder on your domain. This is the most balanced option with no major strengths or weaknesses.
• NOT RECOMMENDED! A generic top-level domain (gTLD) with language parameters (e.g. example.com/?lang=de). A parameter at the end of the URL will direct visitors to a translated version of your content. However, pages with parameters aren’t always indexed, which may be the reason why Google advises against this option.

And here’s something else you absolutely must not mess up. When you interlink your pages, do not accidentally link to another page in a different language (unless necessary). For example, if a user is visiting your German page, you don’t want them to end up on a French page by mistake.

To find these wrong links, run your domain through WebCEO’s Internal Links Analysis tool and check the report called My External Links. Click on the link representing a different version of your domain…

And find the pages from your primary domain. If you see any pages that shouldn’t be linking to your translated domain, pay them a visit and remove those links.

2. Use the hreflang attribute in your code

Once you have translated pages on your site, you can easily let search engines know what languages you are using by implementing the hreflang attribute in your HTML code. Here’s an example:

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/de” hreflang=”de” />

This tag is recommended for use regardless of how much content on your site is translated (all of it or just the navigation, while the rest might be user-generated). The value of the hreflang attribute identifies the language and optionally the region of an alternate URL, so make sure to get it right! Our example has “de”, which means German content independent of region, but if you want to target a German-speaking audience in Spain, you’ll need to use “de-ES” instead. Refer to the list of language codes and the list of region codes to pick what suits your situation and then double-check to make sure your combination is valid.

3. Find keywords through local search

Keywords are the foundation of SEO. When you translate your content, the keywords will inevitably be translated, too. Otherwise you might find yourself trying to rank in China for English keywords – an attempt guaranteed to put a smile or two on people’s faces.

If keywords are what you need, WebCEO’s Keyword Research tool is always ready to serve! Simply go to the Settings and select your Target region.

4. Build links from and to local resources

Link building is another major aspect of SEO. If you manage to earn links to your internationalized content from local resources, you’ll become more visible to your new audience and more trustworthy (especially if you link back to local resources, too). Also, search engines like to see a diverse link profile on a website.

Take a look at your competitors’ backlink profiles – they are the best place to find new sites for link building.

5. Research ways to rank in local search engines

Not all search engines have the same ranking algorithms as Google. When targeting a country, do your research on its own search engines and what kind of SEO strategy they approve of the most. For instance, China’s Baidu requires websites to have an Internet Content Publishing license before they even get a shot at ranking high, and there are many more recommendations. Other search engines will have their own rules.

6. Take culture, customs and currency into consideration

Our Earth is a beautiful place thanks to all the different people and various cultures around the globe. But when you aren’t considerate of the differences between us, it can lead to all sorts of unpleasant situations. Invest some time in researching your target countries’ customs and culture. It might just save your business from a catastrophe!

Also, if you sell products or services, consider using the target countries’ currency in your translated content. It will make doing purchases for visitors from other countries so much easier.

7. Don’t use flags as a substitute for languages

It is wise to separate languages from countries. For starters, many countries share the same language. English is the official or primary language in over 50 countries; is it really okay to use the Union Jack or the Stars & Stripes if you want to target an English-speaking audience in, say, Jamaica? In addition, many countries have multilingual populations; do you mean English or French when you put up a picture of the Canadian flag?

The best way to avoid this confusion is to simply use languages. Write English, Deutsch, Français in the language selection menu – and every person speaking those languages will understand what to do. I like this particular example from Flags Are Not Languages:

Use flags when they are meant to represent countries specifically. Do not use them when you are aiming at an audience speaking a certain language.

8. Don’t use the “one site layout and UX for all” strategy

What one audience prefers may not be received so well by a different one. This is true when language is involved, as well. Here’s the simplest thought experiment. Would your website look as good as it does at the moment if you translated it into Arabic or Hebrew and all text became right-to-left? On certain website layouts, it might become uncomfortable to read. The user experience is an important SEO factor; remember to include it in your international SEO strategy, too.

Take your site’s layout into account before you release a translated version. Consider researching other sites in the language you need as references. Your visitors will be grateful.

9. Don’t auto-redirect to a translated version of your site

Some websites detect their visitors’ IP address, use it to determine their location and automatically redirect them to a page translated into the language spoken there. This practice is flawed in many aspects, which is why you shouldn’t use it.

What is wrong with auto-redirects?

• IP detection and determining the location can both be inaccurate.
• Even if they are accurate, the user might not be able to speak the automatically chosen language.
• Some countries are multilingual (leading to the same problems as “flag instead of language”).
• Redirecting makes it difficult for search engine crawlers to index your site’s pages.
• Redirecting adds to the page loading time.

Don’t decide for users. If your site needs to have the country detection function, give them an option to switch languages instead. For example, an unobtrusive interstitial that is easy to dismiss will accomplish the task just fine.

10. Don’t use machine translations

Automatic translations have been improving, but they are still too far from “good enough”. They can neither satisfy visitors, nor are they safe enough to use on your site. Google easily spots automatically translated content and promptly marks it as spammy.

Leave translating to humans. A real, competent translator is an invaluable asset in any global SEO strategy (bonus points if they are a native speaker). Hire as many of them as you need, it’s an investment worth its weight in gold. Keep in mind that your foreign customers and resellers will often translate your content for free, especially if a discount or more business incentivizes them.

Wrapping up

The Internet is truly one of mankind’s greatest inventions. It allows you to conquer the world without any violence. To make it happen, don’t forget to keep track of your progress.

Monitoring incoming traffic is an unquestionable necessity in every SEO campaign, and when it arrives from several countries at once, it must be analyzed separately. That way, you’ll be able to notice and tend to issues no matter where they find you. The above are simple solutions for global scale problems!

Bring User Traffic from Anywhere in the World Check traffic from different countries Sign Up Free

The post 10 Tips for Planning a Winning International SEO Strategy appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

What is technical SEO? It’s really simple. All it means is fixing issues that are present on your site, ruin the user experience and cause you to lose rankings. Finding those issues is done through a technical SEO audit, which always prefaces the task of solving them.

This technical SEO checklist will cover the most damaging problems with SEO, as well as the best practices in treating them – usually with the help of specialized SEO tools.

1. Rethink your website structure

Some webmasters don’t put enough thought into connecting their site’s pages between each other. When they haven’t planned a structure, it’s not just the users who are rubbed the wrong way. Look at these reasons why every site needs an organized structure:

1. It helps users browse your site without getting lost.

2. It helps search engines crawl your site and index its pages.

3. It helps link juice flow across your site and direct authority to important pages.

It makes everybody happy! Most importantly, users are pleased and motivated to visit again.

So how do you know your site’s structure is organized?

• It follows this pattern: home page -> category -> user’s destination. The destination could be a product page, a blog post or anything else; what matters is that it’s not too deep. You can have subcategories precede it, but the fewer they are, the better.
• It has breadcrumbs. You can see an example of site breadcrumbs in the above point (home page -> category -> user’s destination). When it’s shown on the page with a link to each level, users always know where on the website they are and can instantly go back without taking any excessive steps.
• Every page has a link to the home page. The link is usually built in the site’s logo. This rule doesn’t need to apply to pages such as the sitemap and robots.txt and pages with restricted access.
• You can travel quickly (in three clicks or less) between any two pages.
• It has site navigation and a footer. A few links to important pages at the top and at the bottom will ensure users can find all they need to know.
• It has no orphaned or dead-end pages. Orphaned pages are difficult to access when nothing links to them, and they don’t receive any link juice from your site. Dead-end pages are the opposite: they don’t link to your other pages and don’t pass on link juice. Avoid having both, with the exception of “technical” pages such as robots.txt.

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Internal Links. In particular, the Site Structure report can show you how your site’s pages are arranged.

2. Optimize your internal links

Internal links are the foundation of your site’s structure. It’s how users browse your site and link juice travels between pages. You can make your internal links contribute even more to your SEO by optimizing them. Here’s how you do it:

• Give them anchor texts. A few words inside the link will help users understand where they are about to go. Additionally, this counts towards optimizing linked pages for keywords inside the anchor texts.
• Make them dofollow. Don’t mark links to your own pages as nofollow. You may preserve some link juice on the page you think needs it more, but search engines will be unable to crawl the linked page.
• Write your links in HTML. Search engines can crawl HTML links without any problems, but links made in other languages (such as JavaScript) are uncrawlable.

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Internal Links. See all the anchor texts on your site in the Link Text Analysis report.

3. Fix broken links

Links can point to either internal or external pages. Both of these types of links break for the same reasons. It can be a typo in the URL, or the linked page was moved or taken down altogether. Of the two, a broken internal link is worse for you, since users who click on it want to keep browsing your site but can’t. Fortunately, broken links are a simple problem with a simple solution.

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Technical Audit.

Use this tool to run an audit on your site. The tool will find all links that return an error, the 404 being but one of them. Once you have your list of pages with broken links, edit those pages. You can replace links with working ones or just remove them if they can’t be fixed. With broken outbound links, you have an extra option: put up a link to another resource with similar content.

4. Fix broken images

The only positive of broken images is that pages load faster thanks to them. Still, it’s hardly worth making users miss out on the content or leaving pages to look like a mess. An image that doesn’t work properly has no place on your website.

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Technical Audit.

This same tool can also pick up images that aren’t displaying. Similar to links, this error can be caused by a typo in the image’s URL or being removed from its server. Fix the URL, or find a replacement, or just remove the image from your page if you decide you don’t need it.

5. Have your site’s pages indexed

All the pages you can find in Google exist in its index. If a page isn’t indexed, users can’t find it, no matter how well it’s optimized. Make sure you index all the important pages on your site!

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Sitemap Generation.

Create a sitemap of your site and submit it to Google. You won’t need to create a new one when you add or remove pages from your site, but you should pay a visit to Google Search Console when you want a page de-indexed.

6. Check your on-page SEO

On-page SEO is more than just content. SEO is full of secret joys, so it’s no surprise that you can’t prepare an excellent, keyword-rich piece of content and call it a day. It might make users happy, but search engines are starving for affection, too.

What are the technical aspects of on-page SEO?

Page titles

• Give your site’s pages titles. Some people actually forget this part. The result is nameless pages that confuse visitors and aren’t easily picked up by Google search.
• Make sure titles aren’t too long. Otherwise they’ll be truncated in search results, which makes them look uncool and doesn’t motivate users to click on them. When making a new page, always double-check the title’s length in a Google search result preview tool.
• Make sure no two pages on your site have the same title. Duplicate titles only serve to confuse both users and search engines.

Meta descriptions

Page descriptions in the <META> tag are a little less critical than titles, but you can still use them in SEO – and therefore, you should. They require the same treatment as titles: fill them out, mind their length, avoid duplicates, double-check in a preview tool.

Here’s an extra detail. If you leave the <META> description tag blank, Google will fill the search result’s description with the first few sentences from the page. You can try to save a little time by optimizing those first sentences to work as your description. This is a bit risky, though: Google occasionally tweaks the descriptions’ character limit, which could lead to more headaches for you in the long run.

H1 tags

The big, pretty title shown on the page in large bold letters? It’s usually done by using an H1 tag. Some pages can do just fine without one, but it’s better to have an H1 tag on a page than not. Also, you need exactly one: no more, no less.

Images’ ALT attributes

Images can be given an ALT attribute which serves a double purpose. First, it will substitute images with some text of your choice when the images aren’t displaying for any reason. This is especially helpful for people with vision problems. And second, it helps Google pick them up in its image search. This is good for you because users may find your site that way.

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Landing Page SEO. Use it to detect on-page SEO issues on your site.

7. Fix duplicate content issues

Duplicate content comes in more forms than just plagiarized text. The other faces it wears are:

• Pages with the same content on your domain. This issue can be solved by using 301 redirects (redirecting users from copies to the original) and the rel=”canonical” attribute (denoting the original in the <LINK> tag). Note that in both cases, only the original page will be indexed and ranked.
• Duplicate page titles, meta descriptions and URL slugs. All of these things should be unique to each page.
• URL parameters (for example: website.com/library and website.com/library?page=2), which may cause search engines to index the same page multiple times and view its “copies” as duplicate content. In this case, the use of rel=”canonical” is recommended. You can use Google Search Console to make Google’s crawler ignore pages with URL parameters of your choice and not add them into the index.

8. Improve slow-loading pages

Everybody prefers a fast-loading website to a slow one. You can’t fall behind others or you’ll lose visitors and potentially profits. Who would want that? Consider doing everything you can to improve your page load time.

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Speed Optimization (Desktop tab).

This tool will rate your site’s loading speed on a scale to 100; the higher the better. An orange number is a sign that there’s room for improvement, a red number screams you have problems. On the brighter side, the tool offers helping tips, too.

Here’s how you can raise loading speed:

Optimize your images

Reduce your images’ file size while preserving their quality. You can do it by choosing the best format for them, shrinking their height and width, and by compressing them.

Minimize page code

Every line of code adds to a page’s loading time. Help your site load faster by making your code as efficient as you can.

Merge elements

Certain elements (such as images, CSS files and Javascript files) can be merged into a single one, lowering the number of requests sent by the page to the server. Fewer requests mean less time to process them all, leading to a higher loading speed.

Compress elements

Enable Gzip to optimize website speed and cut down server response time by 70%. So simple, and yet it does wonders for site performance.

Minimize redirects

Getting from page A to page B without any other pages in-between them is a standard. There are situations when redirects can be necessary, but if you can avoid using them, by all means do.

Choose the best hosting for your site

The server is another major factor that affects your loading speed. It may cost a lot to host your site on a powerful server that processes requests quickly, but it’s a valid option when you are able to offset your expenses with profits.

Host big files on external platforms

Why burden your own server with big files when other sites can handle them for you? As an example, embed YouTube videos instead of hosting them on your site.

Use browser caching

Retrieving elements from cache is faster than loading them anew every time. Define the elements to cache and their expiration times in your .htaccess file.

9. Optimize your site for mobile

It so happens that a large chunk of mobile SEO consists of raising your site’s loading speed, the details of which were described in the previous step. If you’ve seen to that, you’ve already done most of your mobile optimization. Keep up the good work, captain!

Here are a few more steps to complete the process.

Responsive design

Pop quiz: what do mobile-responsive websites and cats have in common? Answer: they behave like liquids. They fit in any container you put them in, taking its shape. Cats, however, are born with this ability. Websites learn it through some extra code.

Once your website has that code, you can observe true beauty like on this picture.

Space between elements

Sites look better on mobile devices when they aren’t cluttered. Use negative space and leave some room between elements like buttons and checkboxes.

No Flash content

Flash is obsolete and has been replaced by the newer and better HTML 5. Flash is also outright mobile-unfriendly: it consumes too much power, and certain devices can’t even support it.

No annoying popups

Interstitials are a blow to user experience. Sometimes they are necessary – for example, to inform the visitors you are using cookies. Even then, don’t let them cover too much of the screen space.

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Speed Optimization (Mobile tab). Scan your site and see if you can make it work better on mobile devices.

Now that you’ve reached the end of this post, how are you feeling? With your newfound knowledge and high-quality SEO tools at your fingertips, technical SEO is going to be a walk in the park. Audit your site for issues, then look them in the eye and say, “I’ve solved worse than you on my way to real errors”. They’ll be too scared to talk back – a sign of a job well done.

The post Technical SEO Checklist: Issues to Audit and Fix Immediately appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Influencer Marketing is greater than ever, although at the end of the 1990s we couldn’t even imagine it. Thanks to the Internet letting people open up their own communication channels with the world, everything changed. The Internet became a rich field for conducting advertising campaigns, and day by day it helps marketing experts make their points and reach new, current and old customers. Using Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, X (Twitter), Pinterest and LinkedIn, brands have gotten extra opportunities to promote their products. How did this happen?

Social media platforms took the world by storm. Facebook and Twitter, at the moment of their launching, were a breath of fresh air. Within seconds, they became a place of interest for thousands of people. Year by year these platforms, including YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat, get updated, expand and provide great new possibilities for advertising. Nowadays, mobile devices have overtaken desktop devices and laptops as a platform for marketing. Mobile Internet usage presents a lot of benefits for advertisers. They are able to:

• reach specific audiences, extending their client base in local areas;
• make their brands recognizable;
• heighten the brand’s conversion rate and its loyalty;
• learn insights from their target base.

How can they do these with the help of Influencer Marketing?

Influencer Marketing in general is a process of selling products and promoting brands with the help of people who have a definitive level of authority on social media. A lot of readers think that Influencer Marketing is all about celebrities who started their accounts there. However, a lot of modern influencer marketing is done via ordinary people who gained their popularity on their social media platform from the very bottom, using only the Internet, their skills, knowledge, and desire. These are Instagram and YouTube bloggers, popular users of Facebook and Twitter, and so on.

Let’s be honest and admit: people whom we follow on social media have much more influence than film stars or popular singers. The reason is simple: we trust people whom we have spent years in “close relation” with, watching their success and monitoring their life through photos, videos, or comments.

What are the reasons for using Influencer Marketing when there are already a bunch of ads on the Internet?

Browser Ads are presented via pop-ups, paid results on SERPs, and irritating ads on websites, which are usually cheap and off-putting. Those are always in front of our eyes and, you may suppose, are more powerful, but this is not so. Users are tired of advertisements nowadays and use powerful Ad Blockers, erasing all that is inappropriate for them. On social media developers try to present advertisements in a non-disturbing way, so people even stop scrolling for a few seconds to analyze products provided. Many people like sponsored posts thinking they’re from a friend.

One more reason to advertise on social media is the fall in popularity of TV. TV was once the main way advertisers conducted new campaigns, but time flies and televisions are now being removed from households every day. The race is on to see who will see the last television ad.

With access to the Internet, people just stopped watching ordinary TV channels and started buying subscriptions for services like Netflix, where they can watch popular shows without ads and long waiting periods. Moreover, Generation Z is a significant and important cohort of potential consumers, and they almost don’t watch TV these days, going for social media and messaging apps.

EVEN THOUGH social media has become an important part of our lives and it gives marketing experts a lot of ways to promote products, it’s still not an easy task. People still don’t like advertisements and have a rich choice of what to buy and what to pass by. Advertisers should think a lot about ad campaigns in order to raise demand among capricious customers.

There are some disadvantages you may not have taken into account. Influencer Marketing is an expensive “service” which, unfortunately, can’t grant a large amount of success in most cases. Everything depends on the Influencer’s work and your effort as well.  It’s hard to avoid mistakes. Everything is possible, starting from a wrong presentation of a product because of a poorly prepared strategy and including posting the wrong text by accident. Influencer Marketing is really popular these days and your competitors may have already formed relationships with them.

How to Bear Fruit with Influencer Marketing Step by Step

STEP #1: Research

The future always asks the past for some advice. Your company and its marketing history are one of the most powerful instruments in your hands. Take some projects which are even a bit similar to the one you are currently building a campaign for and explore them comprehensively: sales level, income, customers, models, and – the most important – mistakes. Take a look at your competitors’ performances with similar products and learn their behavior on social media. Pay attention to posts and comments. This will help you to build a strategy and identify your target audience.

You should collect accurate data concerning the potential target audience of the product you want to promote with the help of social media. You can learn a lot of useful material concerning people’s activity on social media, including their demands and behavior regarding branded products. It may be necessary to identify the age, nationality, occupation and interests of people whom your goods may appeal to. This helps to build a decent advertisement campaign and attract a lot of people. Take into account the location of your target audience!

If you are going to promote your products beyond one country’s borders, you should learn the foreign customers’ perceptions of the goods you provide in order not to make any mistakes and hurt your reputation.

After defining your target audience, you should learn where those people “live”: on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. Why is this important? By advertising on the platform where your potential clients chill out most of their time, you will increase the chances for your product to be shown to a greater slice of your target audience.

This is when your Influencers come to the game. Seeing products via people we like and trust, we accordingly start trusting what they trust. This is because Influencers appreciate their audience and reputation a lot and will not advise something bad or untested.

• For demographic and physiographic data gathering you can use Google Analytics.

STEP #2: Budget Approval

Budget problems are always the most troublesome. You should take into account everything and a bit more. Plan your budget with the thought of unexpected circumstances. Get a budget approval with best procurement tools. Popular influencers, especially Instagram and YouTube Influencers, are expensive, because they have a large audience and a lot of them know how much their words cost. Depending on the future strategy for your project, keep in mind that you may want to involve multiple influencers.

Compensation (indemnification) is an important point in your budget plan. There are two points you should pay attention to. The first is you will have to pay an Influencer if your product causes any harm to his or her reputation. The second is a compensation to you if the Influencer doesn’t fulfill his or her obligations fully or does any harm to a product’s or company’s reputation. This is important for both sides and serves as an extra motivation for a successful promotion.

STEP #3: Goal Identification and Strategy Development

In order to build a successful strategy, you should identify your goals – results which you want to get at the end.

If you are at the starting point of your journey, your marketing strategy may be directed to promoting your brand name and establishing a minimum sales level – to see if people are interested in the product you provide.

You may be seeking an extension of your current customer base. You may be advertising a standard product to a new age or lifestyle group. In this case you should take into account Influencers who are interesting for this new group of potential clients. However, remember consumers who are already satisfied with your company. They are the easiest to get more sales from and the costliest of losses if they move to your competition.

The other type of goal is an extension of geographical horizons – entering the international market. You should be the most careful here, because new countries mean new cultures, ideas, and outlooks; even religion must be taken into account. You have to build your strategy so every person will be satisfied or at least not offended.

Sometimes one of the goals may be a cooperation with “new faces”. This means a long term partnership between your company and (an) Influencer(s) you want to work with.

Proper goal identification will help to build a successful marketing campaign, beneficial for each party.

Here we’ve come to the marketing strategy development.

Strategy is basically as important as the process of creating the product.

Work on your concept. At this stage you should think about the uniqueness of your product: why it is better than others and how you can disclose this. Set your product apart from others, impress your potential Influencer with the product, so that he or she and even you yourself would like to try it too.

It is always better to set up several strategies instead of focusing on one. While developing different directions of your marketing campaign you should “touch” and work with at least ten or fifteen successful ideas. However, they may cover different sides of the product and not represent its benefits entirely. So, work on each of them, make them viable, and then put them together. In the end your strategy will be a mix of everything that came to your mind and you saw value in.

Your strategy should cover everything. Decide on platform(s) where your campaign will be promoted. Don’t take into consideration only one platform. People who are interested in your product can breathe everywhere and follow your Influencer everywhere, and the more often they see your advertisement, the greater the desire will rise in them to try it.

There are a lot of examples of advertisers cooperating with social media Influencers, asking them to make a post/say some words in a video about the product, and… nothing more. This is a strike out. Those posts are replaced by others, especially if an Influencer updates really often, and they eventually get lost. This is an under-developed marketing strategy. Yes, this gives some results at the beginning, but you can’t expect this to be tremendous. People should encounter your content as often as possible.

However, you should remember one thing. The social media audience, and people in general, don’t like direct advertisements, they prefer to see why your product is better than others of the same category and is worth their time.

Marketing experts not always know how to use influencers, although there are a lot of ways.

Try to do a series of posts/videos/experiments. This can be a step by step acquaintance with a new product, which an Influencer will try on him-/herself. This will raise trust among the audience; to see a quality sample of your goods and your company itself. Organize not only your Internet promotion, but take him or her to a public venue, where he or she can physically meet with followers and present your product face to face.

Apart from this, people like presents, so give them your product for free, conducting giveaways. What are the benefits of this? In most cases an Influencer gets more followers and your product is discussed not only on an Influencer’s page, but also in the private messages of those who won something.

Take as many stars as you are able to. Start working with several people who are popular enough and make your marketing campaign a competitive collaboration. Influencers will do their best to attract more people to your product than other bloggers you made an offer to. Followers are also happy to see they are working mutually with people they like. Moreover, you can extend the size of the audience who will see your advertisement. This point refers not to every situation, but more people = more diversity. The audience of each Influencer, even if they are from the same niche, is different, because Influencers themselves are not alike: their personality, lifestyle, and outlook attract a great variety of people who may not be found everywhere.

[Popular YouTube book bloggers interviewing an author during the promoting campaign of a new book]

Seed an idea. We can’t apply this only to Influencer Marketing, but to each sphere where strategy development is needed. Sharing your ideas with other people will help you to analyze them deeper. A new, fresh look will help you to identify the weak and strong sides of your ideas, and this can push you to try other variants.

STEP #4: Search for Influencers

An important part of Influencer Marketing strategy is to find those people who will best present your product to a wide audience. There are several ways to identify people who fit your niche and specific project best:

• Use special services which present to you things like demographic data and an Influencers’ sphere of work. Learn about services that you may want to use in the future. All of them cover Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube;
• Use #hashtags:

1. Monitor publications covering specific topics on social media, using existing hashtags. You can separate them and look at the most popular ones. Hashtags are keywords on social media, so don’t hesitate to use this method, if services are not for you.

2. Use WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool which can help you create new successful keywords in your niche that will bring you more people who are interested in your product.

• Conduct Google research. A lot of the websites which are dedicated to your niche may write articles about young and popular faces in their sphere, providing a detailed history of their success. This is a good opportunity to know more about people who are gaining authority day by day.

Learn some tips for choosing the right people:

• Don’t instantly go to an Influencer with millions of followers.

There are a few reasons for this step. First, such Influencers are too expensive, because of the big audience they have. Second, a wide audience doesn’t mean great engagement. Star Influencers may have a lot of followers, but in fact may have a zero-level connection with them. Here comes trouble, because people will pay no attention to your goods.

And, on the other hand, micro-Influencers who have significantly less followers, but a higher level of engagement on their page, have more of a chance to reach people’s attention and promote your products. So, learn everything carefully before choosing people for your campaign, don’t prey on stars or statistics.

Sometimes, in a matter of weeks, an Influencer can get a huge amount of followers for whatever reason: scandal, success, or paid self-advertisement. Don’t try to cooperate with them, because an unexpected wave of followers doesn’t mean the audience will trust the Influencer regarding your product.

• Learn about an Influencers’ brand collaboration and sponsoring history.

This is necessary to know whom an Influencer has worked with. Knowing this information will give you a lot of opportunities:

1. You can find out if this person worked with competitors,
2. How successful this was,
3. People’s opinion about the product an Influencer promoted,
4. How many people were attracted, and
5. Knowing how much they took for a single post/video-mention can help you with the current price calculations.

• Learn the way Influencers operate their accounts.

This means their attitude to followers and the way they represent their niche. You have to learn the style in which an Influencer works: whether they upload long-read posts focused on important problems/funny things, or do they do entertaining or scientific videos. With this you can already be prepared and aware of the format your product will be presented in. As a result, you can draft a script or work on a concept.

• Learn why people have come to that Influencer.

This is about the reputation of an Influencer and what attracts people to him or her. If he or she has a reputation for being a drunk partygoer, it will probably not help you to sell medicine for the liver, for instance.

How to Reach Influencers?

Common methods are:

• Direct Messaging on the main account on social media or the one on which some Influencers create specifically for promotion collaboration offers;
• Through email which is also created specifically for advertisers and which is mentioned on the main page of their site and/or profiles;
• Via the email or phone number of the Influencer’s agent;
• Via the comments section if none of the above mentioned methods are available.

HOWEVER, don’t spam nor subscribe these contacts to an automated email campaign, because this risks abusing GDPR rules!

STEP #5: Strategy Approving and Scheduling

You can’t approve a strategy without presenting it to the person who will work for you. Do not rely fully on the plan which you prepared and which may seem the best for you only.

Let Influencers teach you. This is important because Influencers know their audience the best. No-one will ever be better consultants than they are. After presenting your strategy to the Influencers, who have agreed to cooperate with you, listen to the Influencer’s suggested strategy. People who dedicate their lives to social media and work there know much more about how things work there and can share some valuable tips and tricks. Your strategy will not be complete until Influencers give their final approval.

Vary your concept for each Influencer. If you have decided to bring several Influencers to your project, then give them freedom of expression along with the right to participate in your marketing campaign, especially the Influencers needed for international marketing campaigns. They will make your advertisement brighter, catchy, and successful, using their rich experience. Moreover, they are cultural background experts who will help you to avoid any mistakes.

Schedule the whole working process. Proper scheduling can bring you more success than you think. Sponsored posts are not published by accident. They happen after serious analytical data gathering including know: people’s moods during different parts of the day, the hours of their presence on social media, and even the most visited day of the week. Don’t be afraid to notify your Influencers about posts they should publish. Each detail needs control.

STEP #6: Payment

There are several types of payment for Influencers:

• Monetary compensation:

1. Set price. More often this type of payment is taken by Influencers who have a lot of followers and work with advertisements really well, fulfilling your goal. They set their price or this is set as a result of negotiation with this person or his/her agent. You can pay an Influencer for the quantity of likes and shares, or for people who came to your site above a control amount after ad material was uploaded.

2. Commission + Discount. One more way is to appoint your Influencer(s) a commission from sales on a monthly or weekly basis. You can also supply him or her with a discount for this product which may be used by the Influencers’ followers. This is a nice variant for a long term cooperation and may be comfortable both for you and the Influencer.

• Free products. Beginners usually don’t take money. If you cooperate with young Influencers, who are just building his or her reputation, they may ask for your products for free in order to use them by themselves or present to followers.

STEP #7: Results Tracking

We’ve come to the final step which will show you whether you had success with your campaign.

Results Tracking concerns two parties: you take the statistics from your Influencer(s) and then comply it with your company’s reports. Information from your Influencer concerns engagement. You can’t receive all the information just looking at likes, shares, or comments. Some pieces of this are open to the social media account’s master only. So, don’t forget to ask for those reports.

Analyze your ROI (Return on Investment). Simply put: you will learn the level of your success in percentage (or ratio). This shows you how successful your marketing campaign was and how much (an) Influence(s) brought to your house.

Check your website’s performance on social media. You will definitely publish some material regarding the product on your company’s social media timelines and site landing pages. With WebCEO’s Social Engagement Tool you can easily observe your rankings, social citations and the traffic brought to your website via Facebook and Pinterest.

Also WebCEO’s Facebook Insights Tool gives a detailed report regarding Facebook engagement, niche popular posts, page’s likes, reactions, shares, comments, and clicks on posts. This can also help you to learn demographic data.

WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring Tool helps you to track mentions of your product in news, blogs, and tweets.

SEO Benefits of Influencer Marketing

Any activity on your social media accounts can bring SEO benefits to your website. With Google Web Search Analytics, you can easily analyze how exactly you succeeded after your marketing campaign launched. A powerful advertisement on social media can mean a lot of traffic and the improvement of your positions on SERPs. Google and other search engines like when people come to websites and stay there for a lot of time. This means that the quality of your content will be rewarded by search engines with good rankings.

Moreover, Influencer Marketing can drive a high number of backlinks to your website. Although Google doesn’t count backlinks from social media, it does count backlinks from websites which took your link from an Influencers’ social media timeline. A large amount of backlinks means higher domain authority.

However, be careful about so-called toxic links, because they can have a negative impact on your rankings. Use WebCEO’s Backlink Quality Check Tool to clean your backlink profile. This can help you to identify the total amount of backlinks, linking domains and their authority, link texts, and which of the backlinks are toxic enough to put in Google’s Disavow List.

IN CONCLUSION, Influencer Marketing would likely be a win-win strategy for you: each party will get a piece of the pie at the end of the journey. The best way to find your winning Influencers is to learn about your competitors and their social media campaigns which brought them success and rich backlinks.

Use WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy to find blogs and hubs that promote your competitors and use such channels of opportunity for your website!

The post A Step by Step Guide to Influencer Marketing appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Running a business seldom goes smoothly. But when it does, it fills you with a sense of accomplishment like nothing else. Customers are coming, money is rolling in, business is booming – what could be better?

Of course, there are many challenges on the way to success. And if you fight for it on the digital front (as you should), one of those challenges will involve stealing as many customers from your local competitors as you can. Which is achieved through good old local SEO.

Yes, even after all these years, it still helps businesses not just survive, but grow and thrive. Do you want to know the secrets of local SEO? You’ve found them.

Short on time right now? Get the full PDF guide to read it later. Download the Guide

1. Check for penalties from Google

SEO can be good or bad. When your SEO gets really bad, Google slaps your site with a penalty. Then your rankings drop, and you may even disappear from search results completely.

Are you in any trouble from Google? Check for that before anything else.

Log into Google Search Console as the site owner and select the website you are auditing in Search property. (If the site isn’t connected to Search Console yet, the owner has to connect and verify it first.)

Then in the sidebar on the left, click on Security & Manual Actions and choose Manual actions.

If it says No issues detected, great! If it says anything else, there’s your first batch of problems to fix later.

2. Run a thorough keyword audit

For this step, you will need a list of keywords the site owner is trying to rank for.

You can probably deduce some of those keywords on your own. For example, if it’s a barber shop in Florida, there’s one relevant keyword candidate.

Check the keywords for two things: rankings and user search intent. Let’s start with the former.

First, you need to find out if the website appears in search at all – on page #1 or the 3-Pack. You can try Googling the keywords from the list one by one, but it will be faster to use an SEO tool and check them all at once.

Simply scan your site rankings in WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool. Click on +Add keywords and type in all the keywords you want to check, then press Save and Scan to generate a report.

This tool’s settings allow for scanning in specified locations, which is just what we need for local SEO. It can even detect more interesting search results like the local pack, hotels or Knowledge Panel.

Once you receive the report, look at the columns Position and SERP: they show where your site is ranking. It also doesn’t hurt to check the Local monthly searches column, as it shows how often users type those keywords in Google. If any of these columns aren’t in the report, press the Manage columns button to add them.

Now for user search intent.

• Is the site owner using any keywords which are clearly irrelevant to the site or provided services?
• Are they short-tail or long-tail keywords? Long-tailed ones tend to be more specific, and therefore more effective. It’s very hard to rank for a short-tailed keyword if you aren’t a big shot.
• Do the keywords include words like where, closest, near me? Location-based searches often use words like that, so it’s a common local SEO practice to use them in your keywords too.

3. Check your Google Business Profile

To begin with, does your customer have a listing in Google Business Profile at all?

If not, that’s really bad news for their local SEO and they should rectify it ASAP. But if they do, then you have something to work with here.

Log into their Google Business Profile and see what it’s like.

• Is any information missing?

All fields should be filled out with accurate, up-to-date information about the business. Name, description, categories, address, opening hours and so on. A blank field in GBP is a hole in your local SEO.

Mind the character limits too.

• Are keywords present and used properly?

Keywords (especially local ones) in your GBP are a major ranking factor. They can ensure your business will appear in Google’s very competitive local pack. The catch is, you can’t just put them in the title and call it a day: that goes against Google’s guidelines, which demand using the business’ real-world name.

However, the craftier owners simply include keywords when naming their business. It’s a perfectly valid loophole which satisfies both the guidelines and the ranking algorithm. The only thing to worry about is making the name sound natural.

Relevant keywords should also be included in the GBP categories. Putting them in the description is optional, although encouraged.

• Are photos and other images uploaded?

There’s a variety of images you can upload in your Google Business Profile. The more you have, the better.

• Logo: mandatory. Every business needs one.
• Cover photo: also obligatory. Google displays it in search results.
• Exterior photos: customers will easily find you if they know what the place looks like.
• Interior photos: first-time visitors will be more at ease if they know beforehand what’s inside.
• Team photos: another comfort factor. Bonus points if you have reviews praising individual employees – photos can turn them into local celebrities.
• Product/service photos: customers need to know what to expect.

It goes without saying that all images should be of high quality.

Videos, too, deserve a mention as another type of visuals. If there are any, watch them and see if you can find any problems.

• What is the posting activity like?

GBP allows you to create posts in order to communicate with your target audience. Take a look at the posting activity on the page. How often does the owner post? What kind of content do they post? Do they engage with customers, do they promote events and sales?

Frequent and diverse posts can ensure this feature is used efficiently. Posting once a month is considered the bare minimum. It’s also good for posts to contain links, photos and geo mentions.

• Is there an FAQ page?

Self-explanatory. An FAQ is a powerful asset for any website, and customers are guaranteed to have questions.

4. Find on-page SEO issues

On-page optimization is a lot of work, meaning there’s also plenty of room for mistakes. And for a local business’ website, those mistakes can be pretty costly.

Waste no time dealing with problems. Find them all in WebCEO’s On-Site Issues Overview report.

This tool will scan all site pages at once, so not a single on-page SEO error will escape your attention.

For a local SEO audit, here are the most damaging issues to keep an eye on:

• Broken images
• A missing sitemap
• A missing robots.txt file
• Missing ALT attributes for images
• Overly long, missing or duplicate title and description tags

Naturally, any other issues displayed in the report should not be ignored. They all negatively affect site rankings.

5. Perform a backlink audit

The most powerful ranking factor of all. Backlinks can make or break your SEO even when you’ve done everything else right. No SEO audit is complete without a backlink analysis, and local SEO is no exception.

So make haste. Scan your link profile with WebCEO’s backlink checker.

Once your report is ready, it’s time to appraise your backlink profile.

• Are you gaining or losing backlinks? Of course, quality trumps quantity, but a stable trend of losing backlinks is a bad sign.
• Are you collecting backlinks from domains that are relevant to your niche? It’s the best kind of backlinks which increases your site rankings and authority.
• Are you collecting spammy backlinks from undesirable pages or domains? If yes, it will be necessary to get rid of them – either by having them removed or by disavowing them.
• What are the most common anchor texts in your backlinks? Anchor texts act as your ranking keywords, so your ideal scenario is lots of anchors which match your preferred keywords. Textless anchors also count as anchors and are less than ideal.

Based on this analysis, you will be able to fix the flaws in your customer’s link building strategy.

6. Evaluate your online reputation

A local business lives or dies by its reputation among customers. Good thing we have the Internet, right? There’s no place like it to find out what people think about you… and lose all sleep over it.

Hopefully your customer will keep sleeping well after you are done with this step. What should you check for?

• Reviews

Any self-respecting local business should be collecting customer reviews on its website. Positive and negative reviews, detailed feedback – be sure to pay attention to everything. A review is especially valuable when it has keywords your site ranks for.

Google Business Profile’s review section is another place you can’t overlook. And if your client has created listings for their business on any review platforms, be sure to check there as well.

• Ratings

Where there are reviews, there are usually star ratings on the same page, too. But it’s also common for business directories to display rating scores separately from user reviews.

If your client’s website appears in Google’s local pack, that’s the fastest way to see your client’s ratings. Of course, a thorough local SEO audit will require more information from other places.

• Citations and mentions

Everybody wants their brand to be the talk of the town. Problem is, there’s only so much you can hear with your own ears and so much self-Googling you can do on your own.

Thankfully, there are tools for picking up the word on the e-streets. Who, where, what and when – find all your online mentions with WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring tool. Just add the keywords related to the local business whose SEO you are auditing (its name will do best). The tool will show you the sites and the tweets where it has been brought up.

• Social media engagement

If your client has created social media pages for their business (as anyone should), you need to have a look at them too.

How do you know if they are well run? Pass your judgment by answering these questions:

• How often do they post new updates?
• What is the format of the updates? Text, images, videos, polls or other?
• How much user engagement (likes, shares, upvotes, comments etc.) do they get?
• How do the users respond to the updates in the comment section?
• How quickly does your client respond to the users?

As a rule of thumb, lots of activity (from the owner and users) on a social media page is good. If you find any problems there, jot them down.

7. Check data from Google Analytics

First things first, is your website connected to Google Analytics?

If yes, then you have access to tons of valuable information on how customers interact with your site. Better yet, you can narrow it down to a specified location, which is just what local SEO requires.

What kind of data do you need to keep an eye on?

• Bounce rates;
• Average session duration;
• Your visitors’ search interests;
• Sort your visitors by age and gender;
• Your visitors’ location and preferred language;
• How deeply visitors explore your site and where they drop off;
• Where you get all site traffic from (organic, paid, social media).

Thanks to Google’s switch to Google Analytics 4, you can find almost any metric just by typing what you want in the search bar.

If you have any custom reports which further narrow down your data, make sure to check them as well.

8. Audit your structured data

Structured data can enhance your search results in many ways. It’s one way to turn ordinary snippets into rich results, making them stand out among the rest and attracting more clicks.

However, as is the case with anything even slightly complex, there is room for error. What can happen if you make a mistake with structured data on your site? At best, your search snippets will not get any new fluff. At worst, they might break and display incorrect information. For a local business, that’s more damaging than for any other kind of website – not to mention wasting the effort you’ve put into learning and applying Schema.

Protect your efforts and your clicks. Test your structured data code with the free Schema Markup Validator.

But finding and fixing errors is only one part of the job. You’ve also got to make sure you are using the right Schema for your website. For local businesses, it’s the LocalBusiness Schema. There are countless LocalBusiness types to choose from, and your actual business’ type must match the Schema as closely as possible. For example, a law firm needs the LegalService Schema type.

Last but not the least: where are you using Schema and where are you not? Do you have any pages which don’t have structured data, but could benefit from it?

9. Evaluate the quality of your user experience

A good UX is expected from all websites. If you can’t provide it, clients will go somewhere else, leaving you with nothing except a higher bounce rate. What makes up a good UX?

• Fast page loading speed. Scan your site with WebCEO’s Speed Optimization and see if anything is holding you back. This tool measures your loading speed and Core Web Vitals, both of which are major Google ranking signals.
• Eye-catching, high-quality visuals. If any of your images are too file size heavy, you might want to compress them or pick a more optimal file format for them. Make sure all of them have ALT texts. The On-Site Issues Overview report will help you find images without them.
• Mobile friendliness and responsiveness. Run a check on your site in Mobile Optimization. Just like its neighbor Speed Optimization, this tool offers tons of useful tips for making your site more mobile-friendly.
• No technical issues. Bring up a list of everything you need to fix on your site in WebCEO’s Technical Audit tool.
• User-friendly navigation and footer. If your site has a lot of content to display, pagination and a View more button are also useful. However, all of these things’ effectiveness will be severely reduced if the website is not mobile responsive.

It’s also recommended to use software like CrazyEgg and create heat maps for your site. They mark the exact spots where visitors interact with your site pages (and where they don’t), which offers an easy way to find flaws in your website’s design.

10. Analyze your competitors

Competitor analysis implies evaluating somebody else’s websites. Why even bother with that when you have your own, you may ask? We can name two good reasons:

1. To see how close you are to outranking them;
2. To look for ways to outrank them.

Finding your direct competitors is easy enough. Most likely you already know who’s stealing customers from you. If you don’t, you can always find them on Google’s first page with the help of your main keywords.

But there’s only so much information you can gather from a single SERP. If you want details, it’s time to use SEO tools – starting with Dangerous Competitors.

Open Settings and enter this information:

• In the Keywords tab: your keywords.
• In the Search engines tab: press the Add a search engine button and select the target country, language and location.
• In the Competitors tab: your competitors’ URLs. If you don’t have them, the tool can find them for you with just the keywords and location.

Press Save.

The table will display the websites which are outranking you for your selected keywords. Visit them to make sure they really are your competitors, and once you are convinced, click on the flag icon to start tracking their data.

All right, that was the first step. What comes next?

• Shared Keywords report: it shows your and your competitors’ rankings for all of your selected keywords.
• Competitor Keyword Spy: it displays all keywords which your competitors use and rank for. This report is a good place to find more keywords you could use yourself.
• Competitor Link Profile: this report displays a quick overview of your own link profile compared to your competitors’. It shows the total number of everyone’s backlinks, and while quantity does not trump quality, whoever has the most backlinks might prove to be the richest source of potential backlink donors. Especially if they have backlinks from governmental and educational domains.
• Competitor Backlink Spy: the name says it all. If you want to find authoritative domains which give your competitors backlinks, this is the place. You can also find here more directories to make your own listing.
• Web Buzz Monitoring: although this tool isn’t in WebCEO’s competitor metrics group, you can still use it to find unlinked mentions of your competitors. Sites which have these mentions might find your site relevant, too.

Lastly, don’t forget to simply visit your competitors’ sites and social media pages. Their content could give you fresh ideas.

11. Perform a local content audit

Local business websites cannot live off “buy this” and “call us” pages alone. Google values sites with useful and informative local content, and if yours doesn’t have it, then it’s going to be overtaken by the competitor sites that do.

But first of all, what makes local content local? Simple: it’s the ability to satisfy local search intent. Content that attracts users who are interested in a specific place and what it has to offer – that’s local content. Here are a few examples:

• Travel guide
• FAQ about a location
• City-specific landing page

It’s not enough to have local keywords and phrases (although it’s certainly required). This sort of content is made for users who have a place in mind and want to find something there.

So how do you run a local content audit?

• Does your site have local content to begin with?
• Is it optimized for local search-oriented keywords?
• Does it include relevant phrases commonly used by people from the targeted location?
• Does it have any obvious flaws (thin, outdated, uninformative, has grammar errors, lacks good visuals etc.)?
• What purpose do the pages with local content serve and does their content match this purpose? For example, if there’s a commercial page, but its content leans on the informational side rather than trying to sell the product, that’s a clear mismatch.
• How can your local content be improved? Can anything be safely removed?

12. Analyze your social media activity

If you can make your site appear on Google’s 1st SERP, it will become your richest source of traffic. But when it comes to following a brand and its updates, the social media are more powerful than Google. And that means your local business’ social pages need to be checked, too – especially because managing those pages is a lot of work.

First of all, which social platforms are you using and which ones are you not?

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – you can’t go wrong with these. Your business definitely needs to be there.

LinkedIn or Pinterest? Depends on what kind of business you have. Not every social media platform will be a good fit for you.

Now let’s focus on the pages you do have. Here are some of the most effective ways to use them:

• Regular posting. Once a week is the golden standard, several times a week is great.
• Diverse content. Don’t limit your activity to just text posts. Sprinkle in images, videos and everything else the platform supports.
• User engagement. More is always better – big numbers attract even more likes and shares.
• Encourage user activity. Both online (e.g. with polls and user-generated content) and offline (for example, with contests).
• Engage with other local pages, such as groups and other people’s businesses.
• Launch seasonal campaigns. Holidays are always a great occasion for special offers and events.
• Use hashtags.

13. Find and get rid of duplicate content

There are two kinds of duplicate content: plagiarized from other sites and repeating on your own site. In both cases, you can expect that your site’s pages will be lowered in rankings – if not outright hidden in Google’s search results.

Worse yet, observant visitors may notice plagiarized content on your site and give you bad reviews for being a fraud.

The best solution to this problem is making your content unique on every page that you control. But what if, for whatever reason, you absolutely must have a large chunk of somebody else’s text on your site? There are two ways to deal with it:

• Use the rel=”canonical” attribute in the HTML head of the offending page and link to the original source.
• Mark it as a quote and list the source. Google is smart enough to see and understand such things.

It should be noted that for local business’ websites, the following things don’t count as harmful duplicate content:

• NAPU citations
• Reviews and testimonials
• Directory listings

Note that duplicate listings made on the same directory are duplicate content. They must be taken down.

Also, watch out for different URL variations of the same page in your index – for example, https://website.com and https://website.com?page=1. Google is smart, but unfortunately, not smart enough to recognize them as the same page.

14. Check your internal linking structure for flaws

Website pages need to be organized and interlinked in an efficient manner – namely, to satisfy both humans and robots. Visitors must always be able to find what they need, and search engines must always be able to crawl the whole site (with the exception of a few notable pages like robots.txt). Thankfully, website builders exist, and most of them already come with this sort of efficiency in mind. Still, no system is perfect, and you can never be too careful.

What kind of problems can you find?

• Orphan pages.

Lonely, abandoned pages that nobody links to. If they have valuable content, users won’t find it. Use a tool like Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider to find these pages.

And then decide what to do with them. Either find other pages on your site which could link to those orphans in a natural way, or delete your orphans if they aren’t really needed.

• Too many pages between the home page and user’s destination.

An unofficial rule says the users shouldn’t have to make more than three clicks to find what they need on any website. Too many steps between the home page and the destination, and you risk your visitors losing patience and leaving.

Here’s an easy way to look at your site’s structure. If you have a project for your site in WebCEO, just open the Site Structure report and look for overly long paths.

• Low-quality or missing anchor texts.

Link texts play a major role in the user’s decision to click on them. Put yourself in your user’s shoes whenever you see a link. If its anchor looks weird or is missing altogether, you won’t feel like clicking on it – and the same will be true for the user.

Scan your site in Link Text Analysis tool. It will generate a report with all anchor texts on your site. If any of them stand out, and not in a good way, you should change them to something better.

15. Make sure you have NAPU citations

NAPU stands for name, address, phone number and URL. Sometimes it’s just NAP, without the URL.

As you can guess from the acronym’s meaning, these citations include your business’ contact information – and that’s an absolute must-have.

Which is why your website must contain this information, preferably in a place that’s easy to reach. Additionally, your NAPU information needs to be present in your Google Business Profile, as well as any other site (such as review platforms or business directories) with your business’ listing on it.

As a bonus, NAPU citations can be amplified with your contact email and an embedded Google Map with your business’ location.

Afterword

Congratulations on making it this far! With dedication like that, your local business is in good hands.

Now that you’ve finished reading this guide, feel free to use WebCEO and any other tools you like for local SEO.

Get the PDF guide and start using the tools for Local SEO! Download the Guide

The post Local SEO Guide: What Makes a Business Grow appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Making websites is easy. You don’t even need to be a web designer for that. However, professionals have standards, and web designers certainly do as well. When you need a website made, you turn to somebody who is good at it – and not just because you care how it will look.

A good web designer does more than just create a pretty-looking website. While they don’t have control over the biggest Google ranking factors (such as content and backlinks), they can ensure the appearance and functionality are SEO-friendly, and thus contribute to site rankings.

Alright, enough throat clearing. Here’s the recipe for uniting SEO and web design.

1. Use keywords in the right places

Text is an integral part of any website, and not just because it’s the most convenient way to relay information. Search engines rely on text to understand and evaluate the websites’ content.

Of course, your content itself needs to be as high-quality as possible. Content quality is one of the major SEO factors, which puts a great responsibility on its maker. But to increase content’s visibility in search engines even further, you need to optimize it with keywords – words and phrases which people use to find whatever they want online.

You know, phrases like “SEO for web designers.” Chances are, you found this very article in Google by typing those words or something along those lines. And this article appears in Google because it has “SEO for web designers” in the title.

Are you starting to see the pattern?

Here’s how you find and use keywords.

1. Identify the topic of your page’s content.
2. Use an SEO tool to find keywords related to your topic. For example, this is what you can get with WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool:



3. Pick specific, descriptive keywords from the table. Avoid using short, non-descriptive keywords since they are unlikely to be used by the people you want to visit your site.
4. Include your chosen keywords in your content. Prioritize the page’s <title> tag, <meta description> tag, <H1> to <H4> headings and, of course, the rest of the text on your page.

And a few more recommendations to make sure your keywords don’t backfire on you:

• Don’t optimize multiple pages for the same keywords.
• Likewise, avoid optimizing the same page for multiple unrelated keywords.
• Include keywords in your text naturally, like how you would use them in a real conversation.

Just remember: content comes first. As long as you dedicate a page to a specific topic, you will see how easy it is to use keywords without even trying.

2. Make your site’s architecture SEO-friendly

Web pages are connected with each other via links. And while there’s any number of ways to interlink your pages, most webmasters prefer not to experiment with it – and rightly so. There’s already a tried and tested method which is the most efficient and SEO-friendly:

1. Homepage;
2. A few other pages you can access directly from the homepage;
3. Each of those pages leads to the rest of content on the website.

Together, the pages form a hierarchy of sorts, based on how users look for information and gradually narrow down their search. It can be displayed in a diagram like this:

What makes this structure so SEO-friendly? Because most of the time, people link to the homepage more often than to anything else. This advantage gives the homepage the highest authority score – and that can be passed down to the other pages on the domain.

What else can you do to give your site’s structure more SEO edge?

• Optimized page URLs. Avoid using random strings of letters and digits for your URLs. You want them to include keywords and be descriptive at a glance, like this: https://homepage.com/category-name/subcategory-name/page-topic.
• The rel=”canonical” attribute. You should avoid having pages with identical or even just too similar content, but if you can’t, then put rel=”canonical” in the copycat pages’ <link> tag like this: <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://website.com/original-page” />.
• Site navigation at the top of the page.
• Footer at the bottom of the page.

And most importantly, every site structure needs working links to function properly. No 404 errors nor faulty redirects are allowed. Find broken links on your site and fix them.

Find Broken Links on Your Site Sign Up Free

3. Index your pages and content correctly

Every single search result you see in Google is an indexed page. If a page hasn’t been added to Google’s index, it does not appear in search – and I assume you don’t want that to happen to you.

Fortunately, it’s very easy to index any website’s pages, no matter how many. All you need to do is create a sitemap (a list of all pages on your site) and help Google find it.

How and where?

1. Use a tool like WebCEO’s Sitemap Generation to create a sitemap.
2. Download it when prompted.
3. Upload the sitemap onto your site’s server.
4. Submit your sitemap to Google. (You can do this step in the same Sitemap Generation tool.)

That’s it! Takes about 5 minutes to do.

Note that certain pages should never be indexed, like robots.txt. To make a page invisible to search engines, add this line to its HTML code:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

Conversely, the pages you actually want to appear in search must never have this line.

One last indexing tip: search engines often struggle with detecting hidden content on pages – for example, if it’s put behind a collapsible tab.

4. Make your site mobile-friendly

Perhaps one of the most important steps designwise: making sure your site works perfectly on every kind of device. To do that, you need to make your site’s design responsive – i.e. make it automatically adapt to a screen of any size.

One way to do it is to install a plugin like WPTouch or JetPack. But plugins are a third-party resource, so a more reliable option is to do it yourself.

How do you do that? There’s a whole lot to making a responsive design, and chances are, you will not need to use every trick in that book. But the two absolute must-haves for SEO are the viewport and responsive images. Those are fairly easy.

1. Set the viewport for responsiveness.

The viewport is the user’s visible area on the screen. When your viewport isn’t responsive, it may look okay on a computer’s large screen, but turn into a jumbled mess on a smartphone. Like this:

I’m sure you don’t want your site to look like that.

Fortunately, the solution is unbelievably easy. Just add this line of HTML code to its pages’ <head> tag:

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″>

And you will enjoy a much more natural view on your screen, like this:

• Make your images responsive.

There are two ways to do it: either use the max-width tag in your CSS file, like this:

img {

 max-width: 100%;

}

Or prepare multiple, differently sized versions of the same image and display whichever is appropriate for the device you are using to browse your site. It’s done using the srcset attribute, like this:

<img

  srcset=”image-480w.jpg 480w, image-800w.jpg 800w”

  sizes=”(max-width: 600px) 480px, 800px”

  src=”image-800w.jpg” />

Where image-480w.jpg and image-800w.jpg are the names of your images.

To see if your site is mobile-friendly, test it with WebCEO’s Mobile Optimization tool.

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5. Optimize your images

Images are an important element of the majority of websites. Therefore, you must ensure your images make your site stronger and don’t drag it down.

How do you optimize the images on your site?

• ALT texts: they need to be descriptive and include keywords.
• Filenames: they also need to be descriptive and include keywords.
• File format: save your images in the format which yields the smallest size, but mind the quality.
• Height and width: an image’s dimensions directly affect its size, so they should never be larger than needed.
• Responsiveness: make your images automatically resize themselves to suit any device. (See the previous section about mobile friendliness.)
• Geodata: this data can be valuable for local businesses, helping the site rank higher in local search.

Check if your images are missing anything by scanning your site with WebCEO’s On-Page Issues tool.

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6. Improve your site’s loading speed

No web designer with an ounce of dignity wants to make a slow website. After all, it’s the best way to repel users and not get paid!

How do you make sure your site is a hare, not a tortoise?

1. Reduce your images’ file size. You can do it by making your images smaller, saving them as the most optimal format and compressing them.
2. Enable browser caching. You can use a plugin for that, or you can set the expiration times yourself in the .htaccess file.
3. Host your site on a fast server or a CDN (content delivery network).
4. Use lazy loading. With this, browsers will load only the parts of the page that are currently on screen instead of everything at once.
5. Minimize your page code (but only if you know how). Whether it’s HTML, CSS, Javascript or anything else, shortening and simplifying the code helps browsers process your pages faster.
6. Use asynchronous loading for your CSS and Javascript. Similar to lazy loading, it means your CSS and Javascript files will load only when it’s their turn.
7. Have as few redirects as possible (ideally zero). And if you use them, make sure they can be cached.
8. Have as few plugins as possible.

Run a speed check on your site right now to see what you can improve. WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool offers plenty of recommendations on increasing your site speed.

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7. Use heatmaps to analyze user activity

What is the absolute best way to make your site design more user-friendly? Listening to user feedback, of course!

Even if your users aren’t particularly vocal, don’t sweat it. There is a very reliable tool for finding the flaws in your site’s design: heatmaps.

What are heatmaps? They display user activity on your site: how users interact with it, which page elements they use (and how often), and which ones they ignore. Here’s an example:

Clearly, that one part with the faintest spots doesn’t get much action. Perhaps that part could be moved elsewhere, or the users don’t like how it looks, or they don’t need it at all – that’s for you, as a designer, to figure out.

To generate your own heatmaps, use a tool like CrazyEgg.

8. Make your content accessible

You shouldn’t forget about users who may have visual or hearing impairments. They are out there, they may come to your site, and you don’t want to alienate them. Your web design should be accessible – and that’s so important that Google actively encourages it.

How can you accommodate your website for users with disabilities?

• Write ALT texts and captions for your images.
• Use H1-H4 headings and make them descriptive.
• Make transcripts for any audio and video content you may have. Sign language interpretation is next level, but if you can provide it too, hats off to you.
• Write unique and descriptive anchor texts for your links. Avoid using vague anchors like “click here.”
• Make sure all your content can be accessed with just the keyboard.
• Be careful with color contrast. There are tools like TPGi Color Contrast Analyzer to optimize your site’s color scheme.
• Test your website in a tool like Accessibility Checker to see where you can make improvements.

And here’s a fun fact: CAPTCHA is not considered accessible. Just imagine how many users you will make happy by not having it.

Wrapping up

As you can see, the secret to making an SEO-friendly web design is keeping the users’ best interests in mind. See things from their perspective and use the right tools to fine-tune your creation, and your website’s design will never end up in the list of your SEO problems.

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The post SEO for Web Designers: How to Design a Site That Ranks appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Knowledge is power! – says my favorite TV showman Adam Conover from ‘Adam Ruins Everything’. This guy does his best to ruin the most popular myths, such as the one that says undercover cops need to say they’re cops if you ask them directly. Let’s now bust some SEO myths, like the one that says a high bounce rate is bad.

How Google determines bounce rate and why it can be tricky

Before you evaluate your site’s bounce rate as ‘high’, ‘bad’ or ‘catastrophic’, let’s clear up what bounce rate actually is.

Google may have started using different terms since the switch to GA4, but the meaning stays the same:

• You have all sessions where users visit your site;
• You have engaged sessions where users interact with your site;
• And you have non-engaged sessions where users leave without doing anything.

A session counts as engaged if any of the three conditions are fulfilled:

• It’s over 10 seconds long;
• It has a conversion (or a key event);
• It has at least two pageviews or screenviews.

A non-engaged session doesn’t fulfil any of the above conditions. Therefore, your bounce rate is the percentage of your non-engaged sessions.

In plain words, if there were two sessions, say: a single-page session and a two-page session, one could expect bounce rate to be 50%.

It doesn’t seem to be difficult, unless you wonder what the last statement in Google’s interpretation of bounce rate means: “…single-page sessions have a session duration of 0 seconds since there are no subsequent hits after the first one that would let Analytics calculate the length of the session.”

How does Google calculate the session duration? And what are these ‘hits’? These questions bring us to ‘the truth is out there’ feeling.

Hits are the image requests sent to Google Analytics. Google uses the time between hits to calculate the session duration. Justin Curtoni has distilled the list of engagement data hits that Google uses:

• Pageview hits
• Interactive event hits
• Ecommerce transaction hits
• Ecommerce transaction item hits
• Social plugin hits

Pageview hits are automatically generated, whereas all the rest from the list should be manually implemented with a tracking code. For those who haven’t added any other hits to track, the classic definition of a single-page session remains intact: Google will count a bounce each time a visitor lands on a page and then exits without interacting with it.

Suppose you have a weather forecast site. If one lands on your page about the weather forecast in Detroit and then leaves, it will be counted as a bounce. Is that fair? The visitor may show up every day to get the weather on that page and it will seem like he kept bouncing away (because technically he did).

Now if your tracking code is enhanced with the ability to, say, send an event when one scrolls down a page, as soon as they scroll the weather forecast page, the code will send a request and this session will not have the “0 sec.” duration, even though the visitor technically bounced off.

Think thoroughly on what should be considered as a bounce for your site and take care to measure engagement data to purge your Google Analytics from the ‘false’ bounces.

Let’s assume your developers have already implemented all the necessary engagement hits tracking, so it’s high time to evaluate your bounce rate, right? Actually, no… and here’s why.

Set your own threshold for bounce rate

This may sound like a cliché, but everything is relative. The ‘normal’ bounce rate for sites is somewhere between 26% and 70%. The reason for such an enormous range is that the ‘normal’ bounce rate depends on your site’s theme and a user’s intent.

So, the first thing you should think about while analyzing your bounce rate data in Google Analytics is what’s the individual ‘normal’ bounce rate for your site. For instance, having a website devoted to local events, you shouldn’t expect visitors to wander through your pages when they plan to land on just one page to check the necessary date, time and place info. Most likely, they can leave quickly without even scrolling a page. Thus, a high bounce rate percentage for such sites won’t necessarily mean that something is wrong.

On the contrary, if you sell something online, you will want your visitors to hang around your store for a while to study the products you offer, so they will stay interested and buy from you.

You should set your individual bounce rate and only then perform an analysis. If the ‘real-to-ideal’ bounce rate comparison leaves you unhappy, keep your chin up – you can fix this!

What can cause your bounce rate to skyrocket?

Basically, there are three main causes of incremental bounce rate:

• disruptive UX,
• poor ad targeting,
• referral spam and low-quality backlinks.

It’s not so hard to see if your site provides a bad user experience. Just put yourself in your visitors’ shoes! It can help you notice things that may be frustrating, annoying and unsatisfying.

1. Slow page load time

Have you ever closed your browser’s tab when it took too long to load a page? Most certainly, yes. It’s a well-known fact that people are impatient creatures, so the faster your page loads the better.

A joint Google/SOASTA research confirms that slow pages increase the probability of bounce by 90%, moreover it spoils the first impression, so one hardly ever comes back to your page.

Check your Speed Optimization using WebCEO service. You will be provided with a list of issues with useful prompts on how to fix them.

2. Annoying pop-ups

Ads may be necessary. Cookie pop-ups are mandatory. But if I had to make a UX killer tier list, they’d be in top 3 for sure – and they’d be my first suspects for inflating your bounce rate.

The second most frustrating experience after a slow page speed load is getting bombarded with tons of intrusive interstitials and user-unfriendly pop-ups. If you overuse them, it not only worsens UX, but Google will notice and cause your rankings to drop.

Thus, you should probably avoid adding annoying pop-ups on your landing pages or at least weigh their pros and cons before using them. If you absolutely have to use pop-ups, make sure they are easy to dismiss and don’t obstruct too much of the screen.

3. Low-quality or under-optimized content

Your visitors search for a quick and clear answer to their question. If you don’t satisfy their intent, they will bounce. To create great content, you should:

• understand your customer’s problem,
• provide a solution and describe this in simple words,
• be as concise as possible (no one likes reading a litany).

Don’t forget to make your content easy-to-read: structure the info and use formatting. Use proper language and avoid making grammar mistakes. You could employ someone to review your texts or hire a copywriter. Also, there are many proofreading services to help you, like Wordy, ProofreadingPal, and Grammarly.

4. Poor navigation and design

Keep things simple and intuitively understandable for a novice. Provide your user with a navigation menu across the top of the site and breadcrumbs, so that they can quickly dig through your site in the most convenient way.

Avoid overloading your pages with stuff and distracting a user from the main point. Design your pages to make any visitor understand what you offer at just a glance.

5. Your site is unusable on mobile devices

Are you making your mobile users scroll, pinch, and zoom around to fill out your opt in forms? If so, you’re doing it wrong. Google moved to an algorithm called the mobile-first index long ago, so optimizing a mobile UX is crucial these days.

Run WebCEO’s Mobile Speed Optimization report to see what you can do to improve your landing pages for mobile users.

6. Ensure your ‘call-to-action’ is relevant to a page

For organic searchers, your title and meta description tags can act like a call-to-action in the search engine results (SERPs) before they anyone clicks through to your website itself. Do not mislead your audience with the title tag and meta description that are detached from a page’s content.

Use WebCEO’s On-Page Issues report to check if your titles and meta descriptions are properly optimized.

For those who glance at the paid search results, the call to action can be in the form of the title and description of your ad copy. For example, if your banner ad offers ‘Free Pizza Each Friday’, but then on a click one just lands on the home page of your pizza-delivery site with no link to a more seducing proposition, you can leave new potential customers strongly disappointed (and hungry).

So mind your messages and give your users what they expect to find.

7. Technical errors

Make sure the pages of your site load properly and there are no 404’s left unnoticed. Let WebCEO perform a Technical Audit for your site and report about found issues.

While you’re fixing found broken links, why don’t you create a helpful and attractive 404? A good custom 404 can actually encourage visitors to explore your site further. You can either enhance your 404 with a search box, a site menu and a link to your homepage or just add some humor with a funny picture.

8. Referral spam and toxic backlinks

You may find that your site is being attacked by a referral spammer which attacks thousands of Google Analytic accounts with fake traffic in form of referrals, keywords and even with fake pages. This can dramatically skew your analytics data. If you’re a victim of a spammer like that, here’s a ‘life-buoy’ guide for removing referral spam by Optimize Smart.

Or a referring website is trying to sabotage you with some black-hat SEO tactics. For example, they may have linked to your culinary blog’s homepage with a link text ‘Weight Loss Pills’. Check your backlink quality profile carefully: analyze backlinks value and their texts, mark the unwanted ones as toxic. Then reach out to the owners of these domains and politely ask them to remove the link or you can send a disavow file to Google.

9. Targeting the wrong audience

If your website’s content or products do not match the interests or needs of its visitors, they are likely to leave quickly.

For example, if a site offers high-end luxury items but attracts visitors searching for affordable products, they may become disappointed and move on to another place. This can adversely affect the website’s SEO performance, as search engines interpret a high bounce rate as an indication that the site is not meeting users’ needs.

To target the right audience, it’s essential to do high-quality research into the target audience’s demographics, interests, and search behavior. This can help create relevant and engaging content for the intended audience and reduce the bounce rate on the site.

Conducting research can also help identify potential gaps in the market, which can be filled by introducing new products or services that meet users’ needs.

Summary

Before giving way to despair while looking at your bounce rate, take things under control: manually implement the tracking of other engagement signals in order to purge your GA data and set your own threshold for your bounce rate. Once done, carefully inspect your site regarding UX quality and spammy links and review your ad campaigns to ensure you are targeting the right audience.

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The post Is a High Bounce Rate Bad for Your SEO? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Long tail keywords are more specific keyword phrases that searchers use when they know what they want. These keyword phrases usually have low search volume, but they often convert well. They can be really valuable if you know how to use them.

Why are long tail keywords important for SEO?

Long tail keywords are very specific and super-targeted. This makes them important for your business success.

With smart implementation of a long tail keyword strategy, you may pull in less traffic, going purely by numbers, but the return on your investment will be proportionally much higher. You can attract exactly the audience you’re looking for, and that audience will be far closer to point-of-purchase than those who are attracted by short search terms.

Long tail keywords are important for your SEO and your business, because:

• Long tail keywords convert well. By targeting specific search terms, you can know exactly what your searches need, so you can easily convert them into buyers.
• Long tail keywords are usually very low competition. Most website owners try to get high rankings for more broad search terms, while not thinking about how much traffic low-volume, less popular terms can bring.
• Long tail keywords are valuable for PPC. They convert well, but cost less, since there’s less competition.
• You can build specifically optimized pages to turn searches into customers. As with all SEO, it’s the long game that counts.

How to find the best long tail keywords

Obviously, not every overly long phrase is going to be a good keyword. If you want to find the ones that will work for your website and bring in useful traffic, you must take a few important things into consideration.

The most important of them being user search intent – as in, a keyword’s ability to attract users with the right mindset.

There are multiple types of user search intent. Once you can tell the difference between them, finding the right long tail keywords will be a breeze.

• Commercial: when users are looking for something to buy or comparing different products. Example: the best wireless headphones.
• Transactional: when they want to spend money on something specific (not to be confused with commercial!) Example: order sushi.
• Informational: when they want to learn something. Example: how to learn Python.
• Navigational: when they want to find a site or a page. Example: Robert Downey Jr. Twitter.
• Locational: when they want to find a place. Example: café near me.
• Seasonal: when they want something related to a time period. Example: best places for summer vacation.

And the other thing you want from your long tail keywords is low competition. You can easily measure a keyword’s competitiveness with the right SEO tools.

For example, here’s what you’ll see if you punch a keyword into WebCEO’s Keyword Research tool:

The Global KEI column is usually enough: a high value is better because it means more monthly searches for less competition. If you want details, you can also look at the Average Cost Per Click and Bid competition columns to see the exact competition levels and how much people bid for any given keyword.

Bottom line is: user search intent + low competition = good long tail keyword.

How to find long tail keywords using free tools

Long tail keywords are often very low competition, because others do not think about them. However, there are some tools that you can use to generate a list of long tail keywords for free.

1. Google related searches (autocomplete) and Google query suggestions

When I explained how to use LSI keywords on your site, I could have mentioned two sources that can be a good source of long tail ideas as well as LSI (semantic related keyword) ideas.

1. Google autocomplete: Enter your search term in a search query field, and Google Autocomplete will automatically fetch and show the keywords related to the particular query.
2. Google query suggestions: Enter a keyword and go to the “Related searches” section at the bottom of the search engine results page. These “related searches” are a good source of long tail keyword ideas.
3. People also ask: Similar to the above, this section contains questions asked by users (with collapsible answers). The more answers you collapse, the more questions appear.

2. Quora and other Q&A sites

People use Quora and other Q&A sites to find answers for questions that are really important for them. You can use Quora to see how your prospects communicate their needs and to find out what language you should use.

Go to Quora and enter your search term in a search field. Quora (like Google) shows previously asked questions related to your search term.

When you click on a question, you can see an even bigger list of related questions. It is on the right of the page.

3. Answer the Public

Another great and absolutely free tool is Answer the Public. This tool scrapes the auto suggestions of Google and Bing and draws a beautiful diagram of long tail keywords. This tool helps to create content that’s useful, funny or inspiring.

To start, just enter your keywords and select a country. You will get a list of questions your audience needs to be answered and the list will be beautifully visualized.

4. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is one of the best tools for defining your keyword strategy. You can go directly to Search Console, Search results -> Queries. Scroll down to see a list of actual keyword phrases people are typing into Google to find your site. You can sort them by Clicks or Impressions to pick the ones they use most often.

To get even more info, you can go to the WebCEO Keyword Research tool and see Top queries tab.

Look further down the list and you will find long tail keyword opportunities, especially the ones with a lot of impressions.

How to use long tail keywords on your site

Look at the list of long tail keywords you have gathered using the above mentioned tools. Most of them are discussion-style content. Remember, that the content you create should answer those which are in the form of questions and the content should be helpful to searchers.

Unless you have an army of writers, you can’t create a piece of content for every search phrase you want to rank for. You will have to target long tail keywords by including multiple phrases in your keyword bucket throughout the page:

• Vary the Title tag and headings.

Use different search terms in the page Title and headings. This will also ensure that your pages aren’t over-optimized for your primary keyword.

• Use long tail variations in your content.

By researching the variations of a keyword you might want to include in your content, you can be aware of them as you craft content, and you can strategically place modifiers throughout your page’s content. Long tail phrases can help you create more natural content.

• Pay attention to all on-page elements.

Be sure to place all your long tail keywords in your various pages’ headlines, alt attributes, title attributes, etc.

• Vary your internal links.

This allows you to avoid being “over-optimized,” and if you stick primarily to variations that contain the head keyword and append modifiers, rather than synonyms, you’re consistently transferring relevance for your core term.

The best strategy to bring more traffic to your site is to use all possible tactics. With the WebCEO tools you can easily outrank your competitors.

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The post How to Find Long Tail Keywords That Will Bring Tons of Traffic appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

When your site appears in Google for any search query, it’s called an impression. Then what is click-through rate (or CTR)? It’s the number of clicks on your search results divided by the number of impressions, and then multiplied by 100%. Or much shorter and prettier as a math formula:

CTR = Clicks/Impressions * 100%

Organic CTR is extremely important. Not only does it represent your site’s popularity with the users and the quality of your search snippets’ optimization, but Google also uses it to determine your ranking positions. If your CTR is high, Google moves you up in rankings. If users don’t give you clicks, you’ll be pushed down even from the #1 position as Google will realize your site isn’t relevant to them. That’s why you want your click-through rates to be reasonably high at all times.

What is a good click-through rate? An average CTR of 2-5% is considered good, which may not seem like much. However, don’t forget that there are billions of Internet users, so you are still looking at dozens of millions of potential customers. A CTR lower than 1% is bad news, but if you want to increase yours – you’ve come to the right place.

So let’s begin boosting your CTR.

1. Be on Google’s page #1

The first step of this operation is also the hardest. And yet without it, you can forget about increasing your click-through rates. As the old joke says, the best place to hide a dead body is Google’s page #2. Search results get exponentially fewer clicks the deeper you go.

Fortunately, it doesn’t mean you must overhaul your entire site’s SEO, build a ton of backlinks and get every one of your pages in the top 10 positions – although it’s certainly recommended. There’s a much easier way: start with the pages that are already ranking on Google’s page #1. Improve their click-through rates, and more of your pages will rise in rankings as a result of your site becoming more authoritative.

Find your highest ranking pages in WebCEO’s Top Pages report. Just sort the table by the Avg. position column.

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2. Optimize pages with low CTRs

With some luck, the previous step will have helped you find more than a few pages to start working with. Now, which ones are you going to optimize first?

Eventually, you’ll want to have them all optimized. But you’ve got to start somewhere specific, and so the best pages to do first are the ones with the lowest click-through rates. They will be the easiest to improve – because, if their CTRs are abysmally low, they must have some obvious flaws that will be easy to fix.

The same report in WebCEO as before, Top Pages, has the information you need. Sort the table by the Avg. position column and jot down the pages with the lowest organic CTR (as displayed in the CTR column to the left). Those have the greatest potential to become your biggest traffic magnets and conversion wellsprings.

3. Optimize for the best keywords

Are you familiar with the purchase funnel? It can be depicted like this:

Starting with awareness of your product and ending with purchasing it, there will be fewer people on each level than on the last. That’s because not all users are interested in sealing the deal to begin with. Getting clicks requires catching the attention of the users who are interested.

That’s where keywords come in.

There are two mistakes you can make at this point:

1. Optimize for keywords which are used by people too far back in the purchase funnel. The chance of those people becoming your customers is critically low.

2. Not optimize for keywords which are used by people near the final level who will probably close. You will miss out on the users who are the most likely to click.

The correct course of action: optimize your web pages for the most optimal keywords. They are the ones that capture the desired user search intent and have a high number of monthly searches. Find such keywords with WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool.

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If the pages, whose CTR you are improving, already have the best keywords, great! Proceed to the next step.

4. Make your titles clickable

Now we get to the search results themselves. An ordinary search snippet has three elements: a title, a description and a URL address. More elements can be added through the use of structured data, but we’ll get to that later. For now, we’ll cover titles.

What makes a title clickable?

1. You must not have any duplicate page titles on your own site, and you should avoid sharing them with other sites. A non-unique title will blend in with the rest and not attract any clicks.

2. Matches the page’s content. If the title describes one thing and the page has something different, you will lose clicking users.

3. Contains a keyword. You already know that the best keywords reflect user search intent. Your titles should include at least one such keyword, preferably right at the beginning.

4. Includes attention-grabbing words. Brian Dean of Backlinko recommends using these words where appropriate:

5. Is specific. Which search result would you rather click: Buy iPhone or Buy iPhone 7 32GB Black in U.S.? The more specific, the better.

6. Stays within the character limit and isn’t cropped.

7. Uses emotion-invoking words.

8. Has symbols that increase clickability: colon, brackets, question mark, percent symbol.

9. Has numbers.

10. Includes words “why”, “what”, “how to”. Note that “how to” tends to be less effective than the first two.

11. Composed like this: number + emotional hook + type of content + subject. Example: 20 Unreal Facts About Your Favorite Food.

And another easy trick to make your titles clickable: find posts with a lot of user engagement in social media. Those posts’ titles may provide some great examples of what you need.

5. Make your descriptions clickable

In terms of making them more clickable, meta descriptions need to have many things in common with titles:

1. Uniqueness

2. Matching the page’s content

3. Containing keywords

4. Having power words

5. Abiding by the character limit

And there are two more requirements that can make or break your description.

6. Include a call-to-action.

7. Appeal to specific customer types (or personas). This part will require some experimenting in order to find the persona which gets the most clicks.

6. Make your URLs clickable

URLs are much easier to optimize. For one, they need to have much fewer things in common with titles and descriptions: be unique, match the page’s content and contain keywords. And then there are only a couple more factors:

1. As in, consisting of actual words instead of looking like gibberish of random symbols.

2. A single glance at your URL should be enough to understand what the page is about. The only acceptable exception is the home page whose URL often contains just the brand name.

7. Get rich snippets

Now, you’ve definitely seen search results which had more elements than the main three. Rich snippets are results which also have images, rating stars, review scores, products’ prices and so on. Those additional elements can only be added by using structured data on your site.

A study by Search Engine Land found that rich snippets get 30% more clicks than normal boring search results. I’ll bet you would fancy a few experiments with structured data now. There’s no better place to get started than its official website: schema.org.

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8. Get featured snippets

Users often click on the first thing they see in Google. It’s why Position 0 results get lots of clicks and tons of hate. A study by Ahrefs revealed that the top organic results get 6.4% fewer clicks on average when there’s also a featured snippet displayed.

What can I say? All is fair in love, war and Internet marketing.

Pages at Position 0 usually already rank in the top 10 positions. Barring YouTube video snippets, you can get these for your site:

• Paragraph snippets
• Numbered list snippets
• Bulleted list snippets
• Table snippets

The first three types of featured snippets require you to optimize your page for a long-tail question keyword (such as “how to repair a kitchen faucet”) and provide detailed information on the subject. Since it’s often easier to do in the form of a list, numbered and bulleted list snippets are very common.

Table snippets are given to pages which have tables and are enhanced with structured data.

9. Get in the Knowledge Graph

Google’s Knowledge Graph is reserved for brands and businesses. It’s big and impossible to miss, which makes it a powerful click magnet – not to mention that it makes you look like a huge deal.

How do you get a Knowledge Graph panel for your business?

• Use structured data on your site
• Get a Wikipedia article about your business
• Create a local listing in Google My Business
• Get featured in Google News and other online news
• Have business pages in social media

10. Get in Google’s local 3-pack

Have you ever noticed that block with three results under Google Maps when you Googled a product or a service? That’s the 3-pack. And of course, being placed above the organic results, it steals clicks from them just like featured snippets do.

Follow these steps to get your business in the 3-pack:

1. Create a Google My Business listing;

2. Fill out your business information on GMB and on every other website where you have a listing;

3. Keep your information consistent across all websites (and be sure to update it everywhere if anything changes);

4. Collect as many positive reviews from customers as you can. This will also make your result in the 3-pack more clickable on its own, as a positive rating inspires trust.

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11. Get sitelinks

Sitelinks are additional links that appear in your search snippet under its main body. They look like this:

They can include up to 8 links, not counting the “More results from…” link. You can view them as your site’s navigation built right into your Google search result.

As you can imagine, that’s a tremendous benefit: not just one, but multiple links pointing to your site, all in one ranking position. Sounds like you should absolutely get those for your own site, right? But of course, there’s a catch. Sitelinks are created automatically by Google’s algorithm, and they are completely out of your control.

Still, sites with sitelinks tend to have a few things in common. If you meet these requirements, Google might just decide you deserve sitelinks.

• Rank #1 for your brand name
• Have an efficient, easy-to-use site structure
• Have links to all important pages from your home page

Since you can’t decide which of your pages Google will choose, the only correct way to optimize them is after they start appearing in your sitelinks – whichever they are. Each sitelink is made of a title and a description, both of which have much smaller character limits than usual. Therefore, if you want to make them more clickable, you’ll need to put a call-to-action right at their beginning.

12. Add breadcrumbs

It’s always recommended to add breadcrumbs on your site to improve navigation and user experience, but you can also add them directly in your search result.

Breadcrumbs have a few things in common with sitelinks. They put several additional links to your site in your search result, they make your search snippet eye-catching and, of course, drive extra clicks. But the best part? Unlike sitelinks, you can actually add them yourself!

There are two ways to create breadcrumbs: a) make a list of links via HTML or b) use structured data. As you can see in the example above, breadcrumbs replace your page’s URL, so make sure every step is descriptive!

13. Use tools to preview your search snippets

Chances are, your perspective won’t be as reliable as the users’. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check out the attractiveness of your search snippets with your own eyes. You absolutely should.

Here are some free tools which can generate previews of search results:

• Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress
• SERP preview tool by Spotibo
• Google SERP Simulator by TechnicalSEO.com
• Google AdWords (essential if you are running ads)

And be sure to check how your snippets look both on desktop and mobile devices.

14. Improve your loading speed

Yes, you read that right. Now you’re probably wondering what this has to do with making your search results more clickable. Well, it’s less about driving clicks and more about making sure they work.

Do you know when exactly a click registers? If you just answered “when the user clicks”, you are wrong. A click registers after the user clicks and when the web page actually loads. Therefore, if the user clicks and closes the page before it finished loading, the click doesn’t count.

That’s why you need to make sure your site loads quickly – to avoid that exact kind of a situation.

• Host your site on a fast server
• Host your site on a content delivery network
• Optimize your page code
• Optimize your images
• Merge elements which can be merged (such as multiple images going one right after another or CSS files)
• Enable browser caching
• Use compression software like Gzip

If your CTR is low, you should check your site’s loading speed to see if it’s a factor. Test it now with WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool.

15. Monitor your progress

The first step was the hardest, and the last is the easiest. The only thing to worry about at this point is that your efforts might not have worked. But you won’t know until you’ve checked.

When you’ve added your site to Google Search Console, connect it to your project in WebCEO and start drawing data from Google. The Top Pages report is automatically updated daily and displays the data for the last 30 days. Be sure to check it often!

The post [New Guide] 15 Stratagems to Boost Your CTR in Google appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.