There’s no shortage of how beneficial content marketing can be for a brand and business. Up to 96% of surveyed marketers claim that creating content has been successful at building their credibility and trust among their customers, especially when they prioritized creating high-value informational content over promotional ones.

Regardless, there’s no denying that not every content marketing effort pays off. Many types of content—like long form pillar blog posts—may stand the test of time and get great results. These are often the types of content we invest the most in because if top-performing content can get us more traffic, that also helps us gain more leads, and eventually more sales endlessly at no extra cost.

Is your content underperforming?

It’s great if your brand is able to churn out high-performing content every single time, but we know that that’s not always a realistic goal. So what can you do if you constantly have underperforming content on your blog?

One option is to keep going at it and hope your next published blog posts will perform better. But we know this option can be costly to marketers and doesn’t make the most of any existing content.

There are better ways. Keep reading because we’ll show you 10 effective tips that will actually help you get better results from your underperforming content. Soon, you’ll see better search results and traffic coming from even your older posts.

1. Ensure That Your Site Can Be Searched and Indexed

First of all, one reason you might not be seeing any results from your content is because of a site indexing issue. There can be a few reasons your site hasn’t been indexed, i.e. can be discovered and read by search engine crawlers, or the special agents Google and other search engines use to discover, browse, and understand your content.

Having a website that isn’t indexed means you’re invisible to Google—and that means you’re invisible to potential customers too.

Make sure all your content stands a chance to perform by ensuring your site is indexed. There are quick ways to check this too. Here’s the simplest way to make sure your site is actually indexed, especially on Google:

1. Go to Google and type in site:yourwebsite.com.
2. You’ll see how many pages on your site Google has actually indexed.
3. To search for a specific blog post, type in site:yourwebsite.com/slug where the slug is the actual slug of the content you’re checking.
4. Don’t get any search results? That means this specific page or content is not currently indexed by Google.

An easy fix for ensuring your site is indexed is by submitting an indexing request via Google Search Console. You simply need to log in to the app, navigate to the URL Inspection Tool and hit the “Request indexing” button.

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2. Improve Your Content’s Headline

The power of an effective headline can do wonders for boosting content performance. Among all of the factors Google uses as a basis for ranking content, one of them is your click-through rate (CTR).

This refers to how often people are clicking through to your blog post or page after seeing it as a search query result. The higher you can raise your CTR, the higher your content will rank.

To apply this to underperforming content, change up your posts’ or pages’ headlines. Optimize for SEO as best as you can, but experiment with different headline formulas that might drastically improve those click-throughs.

Of course, give your headline tests enough time to gather data. You may only notice changes weeks and months down the line, so make it a habit to do regular SEO audits on your content to see how new headlines are performing or not performing.

3. Match Your Keywords and Your Content with Search Intent

Another tip to get better results from underperforming content is to see how the search engine result pages of your chosen keywords look like. By understanding what users were looking for when making their search—or search intent—you can edit your content or adjust your keywords accordingly.

When a user finds your page from a search result page then clicks through and finds that your content doesn’t help them with their search, they’re most likely to bounce right away. This can hurt your page’s performance. So a quick remedy to save your content ranking is adjusting your content to match users’ search intent.

You might do a quick skim of the top-performing content for your keywords and see what search engines are picking up from their content. Are they answering your users’ questions better? Is there a section that would help match your content to people’s search intent?

Small tweaks can bring great results, so review top performers to see how you can be the go-to post or page for your users.

4. Implement the Topic Cluster Model

The topic cluster model might be one of the best content marketing strategies you can use to boost the SEO performance of all your content overall. A topic cluster is essentially a group of blog posts centered around a broad topic, then tied together with a comprehensive pillar page that links between these cluster posts.

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Boost your underperforming content by linking them to an existing pillar page you might have about the topic. If you don’t have one yet, this is the perfect opportunity to write one. Make sure your main pillar content is broad enough to create several sub-sections and cluster content but without being too general.

If you have several blog posts on your site as is, using the topic cluster model can be a great way to get these posts organized. Plus, they play a big role in boosting your SEO since they help organize and prioritize your most important content pieces.

5. Incorporate Videos into Your Existing Content

When Google acquired YouTube in 2006, it slowly began introducing subtle changes to its search engine result pages. You might notice that many search queries render video results as well—this is no coincidence.

Some users do Google searches while being agnostic about the delivery of their query. So whether it’s a long blog post or a video, your content might just be able to perform better if you explore another medium of delivery.

See which of your underperforming content might fare better if supplemented with a valuable video. To make the video creation process faster than it might otherwise be, use a tool like Boosted to create better videos faster, especially with templates and a stock library for footage and music.

6. Don’t Discount Your Content’s Meta Data

Metadata can go a long way for improving those underperforming posts. After all, title tags are still a valuable ranking factor to search engines, so make sure those headings contain your chosen keywords.

On the other hand, meta descriptions might not necessarily bear any weight for on-page ranking anymore. However, many users read the meta descriptions to get a taste of what to expect from your content. Optimize this copy accordingly; convince your users that your page has the information they’re looking for so that your CTR gets better too.

Because you have limited room to optimize your metadata copy, use a robust keyword research tool so you can cover them in your blog posts and headings as needed.

7. Make Your Content More Comprehensive

Finally, one way to really make those underperforming content pieces shine is by updating these old blogs and making them more valuable to readers. If your blog post is looking a little thin and doesn’t contain enough information, readers might bounce and look for another site that could help.

It’s a little-known strategy for promoting your content but it works so well because of how easy it can be to refresh an old post with new or more information. Use more updated examples and sources, look for better modern photos and images, and remove any information that might now be outdated.

Try to check what the top performers in your search query have, then aim to make your blog post better than theirs. Fill in the gaps of their content, then use all the other tips you’ve learned above to really pack a powerful punch.

This step is helpful in that you don’t need to constantly create new posts about the same topic from scratch. You can simply repurpose old and underperforming content and make it better than it was before.

8. Get Rid of Low-Quality Backlinks

There can be no SEO content strategy without backlinks. But they are like food: more isn’t always better. Do your link building right, and you will have sites with authority vouching for yours and boosting your rankings. But if you collect backlinks with no care about where they come from, Google will have a hard time seeing value in your site.

Run a check of your website’s backlink profile with WebCEO’s My Backlinks tool.

Specifically, look inside the Toxic Pages report. It will have a list of potentially harmful backlinks from sites of low authority – and if you disagree with how the tool defines “low authority”, you can tweak the settings to your own liking.

Find the backlinks coming from web pages that are not relevant to your content at all – those are the ones hurting your rankings. Get rid of those backlinks by any means you prefer (by changing the linking pages directly or through Google Disavow).

9. Fix the Technical Issues on Your Site

Perhaps the most obvious reason behind your content’s poor performance could be its, well, poor performance. In a technical sense. Maybe something on the page doesn’t load. Have you checked?

Site errors can be really sneaky if you neglect tracking them with SEO tools. If you haven’t scanned your site for errors lately, now is the best time to do it.

This is what you will see after scanning your site with WebCEO’s Website Audit tool: a list of issues currently present on your site with tips for fixing them. Tend to everything you can, then see later if it helped your rankings rise. Unfortunately, Google offers no fixed time frame for when it takes effect.

10. Strengthen Your Internal Linking Structure

When a page links to another page, it shares some of its authority. Does it mean that pages with high authority have more of it to share? Correct.

It applies both to pages from other sites and to your own site’s pages. So what happens to a page when no high-authority pages link to it? Its own authority stays low and it doesn’t rank high. There you have another potential reason why your SEO content strategy suffers.

Scan your site’s internal linking structure with WebCEO and see how you can improve it.

Specifically, here’s what you can do:

• Check the Page Authority Analysis report to find out which of your site’s pages have the most authority. Try linking from those to your content (but only when such links make sense).
• See the Landing Page Analysis report to analyze individual pages. In this report, you can check which pages link to your content and which do not.

Key Takeaways

Getting better results from underperforming content is one of the best ways to boost your engagement and get more meaningful conversions from existing pages on your site.

Remember that perfecting your SEO strategy is an ongoing process and can be tedious—however, what sets the best SEO players apart is how they’re able to play the long game of ranking content, and that includes putting in the work to make even underperforming content on their site perform better.

How good is your SEO content strategy? See its results in your site's Google rankings! Sign Up Free

The post 10 Ways You Could Improve Your SEO Content Strategy Right Now 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.

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.

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.

How come SEO doesn’t work without content marketing? Why do you need both?

When you have only SEO: You get content that appears in search, but users don’t care about it. Do you want site users to be more than just viewers and bystanders? Do content marketing.

When you have only content marketing: You get content that nobody ever finds online. Your content and your audience; do you want these two to meet? Do SEO.

Content marketing is about making your content work and making content that works. With SEO in the equation, there’s also making your content rank. It’s clear that content is at the crux of all of this business, and that a successful union of content marketing and SEO requires fulfilling those three requirements.

And here’s how you meet them.

1. Making the best content

Let’s define “the best content” first. The devil is in the details, so let’s grab him by the horns and drag him out into the light.

• The best for whom? That’s easy: your target audience.
• The best at what? At being what your target audience needs when they use Google (or any other means of search): a solution to a problem, a source of accurate information, entertainment etc.
• If it’s the best, then what is it better than? That would be the best currently existing content, most likely owned by your direct competitors.

So the goal is to create content which has these three traits. All of them, even the third one, boil down to pleasing your audience. How do we do that?

Obviously, in order to be popular with your audience, you need to be intimately familiar with them. What they like and what they don’t, what they want, how they think – that’s the bare minimum. All these things are on your users’ minds every time they search for some specific content and can be summarized in three words: user search intent.

So, how do you satisfy search intent?

• Choose a topic (or a range of related topics) your target audience is interested in. With a variety of topics, you will be able to attract more visitors, but you’ll also risk turning into a jack of all trades and a master of none. Keep educating yourself!
• Create content that isn’t bad. Sounds painfully obvious, but this is the one step you absolutely cannot mess up at any cost. Otherwise your whole campaign will crumble like a house of cards.
• Create unique content. Users don’t want more of the same thing they’ve seen elsewhere. Your site may share a purpose with others, but the rest needs to be special.
• Make your content as in-depth as possible. This is the sort of content that tends to be the most popular, gets the most backlinks, ranks the highest and drives the most traffic. Be careful not to confuse depth with length; a 4000 word long-read might be full of water instead of anything actually useful.
• Anticipate questions that are related to your content’s topic. For example, if a user is looking for an article about getting rid of facial wrinkles, they’ll also want to know about the best diets and skin care products. Additional related information will make your content more in-depth, as well as add more keywords to rank for.

That should help you form a clear vision of what your content should be like. Proceed to create what you envision and make it better than whatever is ranking on Google’s page #1.

The next step is to give your content the ability to convert users.

Converting means making users perform a specific action on your site (such as subscribing or buying a product). As you can imagine, this is one of the most vital parts of content marketing; it’s where you sell your content. For this part, you are going to need careful planning and experience in using websites similar to your own.

• Include your main keywords in the titles, descriptions and URLs.

Not only is this really good for your SEO, it’s also the best way to let the users know you have the content they need.

• Give the users an incentive to perform the desired action.

Users will never do what you ask if they don’t get anything out of it. If they come to solve a problem, say the solution is behind a call-to-action. If they’ll want more content like the page they are viewing, let them know they will have more if they subscribe, and so on.

• Plan out the path from the top of the page to the CTA.

Place yourself in the users’ shoes. How would they use your content? Where would be the best spots to put CTAs?

You can try to play the guessing game, or you can analyze the pages on your site that have already attempted to convert users. Use a heat map generator both on the pages that succeeded and the pages that failed to see what works and what doesn’t.

• Emulate the more successful sites.

Learning from the superior is a sign of wisdom. And the best part about imitating websites with high CTR scores is that they don’t have to be your direct competitors. For example, you can safely pick an ecommerce site which sells different products than yours and see what it does better.

Find what works for others and start doing it on your own site. And if you can make improvements to their tricks, that’s even better. Content creation software tools could help you a lot in the process of planning and producing high-converting content.

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2. Optimizing content for search engines

Content marketing and SEO both play an equally large role in putting your site on the first page of Google. If content marketing can be described as the social aspect of conquering the search, then SEO is the technical aspect. So what do you do on the SEO side of things?

Use keywords that will bring you the most traffic

You can find keywords for your site with WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool. But how do you know a keyword is good?

You know how Google works: you type in a few words, and the search engine shows sites which have them. But the search results don’t always have the exact match of your query; they may have synonyms or even be missing some of the words you used. What does this all mean?

The best keywords have these traits:

• Descriptive and clearly reflecting user search intent. These types of keywords are known as long-tail.
• Semantically related to your main keywords.
• Have a high number of monthly searches (or search volume).

If you have connected your Google Search Console account to your WebCEO project, you can check the effectiveness of your keywords in the Google Search Queries report, namely:

• Average ranking position in Google
• Click-through rates
• Clicks and impressions

Make your site mobile-friendly

Everyone has a mobile phone with an Internet connection these days. To make a long story short, make your website and its content work as well on mobile devices as on PCs – or even better.

• Increase loading speed
• Implement a responsive design
• Leave some space between elements
• Make sure your popups don’t cover too much screen
• Don’t use elements unsupported by mobile devices (such as Flash)

Test your site with WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool to see how well your site looks – both on mobile and desktop.

Fix technical errors

Promoting a site full of errors is like trying to win a race in a broken car. You’ll never finish first, if at all.

Now, you can’t know when something might break on your site, but you must fix all errors no matter where and when they appear. A few examples of what could happen to your site:

• Broken links (they are especially damaging when they are broken CTAs)
• 404 errors
• Unindexed pages
• Server errors
• Broken page code

Use WebCEO’s Technical Audit tool to check if everything is all right with your site. If there are problems, see to them immediately!

Fix SEO errors

Unlike technical errors, optimization errors don’t cause your site to malfunction; in some cases, they might not affect a user’s experience at all. They simply mean you are squandering your site’s SEO potential. Googlebots can pass over your site and not really know what it’s about if you don’t optimize.

Here are a few examples of SEO errors you can fix to increase your rankings.

• Missing H1 tags
• Missing sitemap
• Missing robots.txt file
• Missing image ALT attributes
• Missing hreflang tag in localized pages
• Blank, overly long or duplicate meta tags

Find these errors on your site with WebCEO’s On-Site Issues Overview tool.

Break your content into segments

Long content can be a chore to take in all at once. If yours is like that, make it easier to consume by dividing it into parts. Here’s what you can use:

• Paragraphs. This is the easiest and most obvious way to improve readability. There’s no limits on how short you can make them; even one-sentence paragraphs work wonders.
• Subheadings. This is the best option SEO-wise. H2, H3 and H4 tags can act as titles for individual segments, which helps both the users and Google understand the structure of your content and what it’s about.
• Images. These are best used when they are relevant in the context, especially when they contain valuable data (such as diagrams).
• Calls-to-action. If there’s just one CTA on a page, some users will never even see it, let alone click on it. Placing a few CTAs throughout the page (where it makes sense in the context, of course) is a good way to boost your conversion rates.

Use high-quality visuals

Pictures and videos are among the decisive elements that shaped the Internet as we know it. They play a major role in driving conversions, too. What are the best ways to use them?

Images:

• Use only high-quality ones (unless there’s a point you want to make with poor quality)
• Set their height and width to the exact size you need, and not a pixel bigger
• Convert them to the format that will yield the smallest file size
• Merge them into a single image where possible

Videos:

• Use only the ones with high-quality visuals and sound
• Host them on other sites like YouTube
• Set them to play automatically where appropriate (for example, above the fold where you don’t want the users to miss it)

Increase site loading speed

Other than helping you rank, site speed is the decisive factor in keeping users on your site. Here’s what you can do:

• Host your site on a powerful server or a content delivery network
• Enable caching in the .htaccess file
• Use compression software such as Gzip
• Minimize your HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other code
• Optimize your images
• Don’t host large files on your own site
• Keep your page redirects to a minimum (the ideal minimum being zero)

Test your site with WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool and see what needs improvement.

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3. Promoting content

Now comes the “marketing” part of content marketing. Everybody says high-quality content is the key to ranking in Google. And of course, there’s a catch. Even the best tourist content about the Spain doesn’t go places on its own; it needs your help to make it happen.

See, content isn’t restricted to being Internet pages. Content, first and foremost, is information that motivates a person to become your customer. Anything that falls under this definition can be considered as content: an email, a Google ad, a TV commercial, even shouting in the streets. It’s only a matter of reaching your target audience.

Let’s assume you have picked your audience carefully and that your content matches their interests. Here are the next steps.

Build links strategically

Link building is where SEO and content marketing intersect the closest. Everyone will tell you that in order to build links, you need to create high-quality content. But when you try it, the best you get is a few nofollow backlinks from social media. Why does it work for your competitors and not for you?

Because this plan is missing several crucial steps.

You’ll be lucky to get any backlinks by doing nothing other than making content. Other sites, especially the authoritative ones, won’t stumble upon it by chance and just decide to link to it on a whim. The best link building technique is to create content which has value for the audience and for the linking sites.

Simply put, here’s the plan:

1. Expose other sites to your content

2. Give them an incentive to link to it

What possible incentives are there? Here are a few instances when link building turns into a mutually beneficial exchange:

• Your content is a source worth citing in Wikipedia.
• Someone (for example, a blogger or a reporter) is in the process of writing an article. You reach out to them and offer to use your site as a source. One of the sites where you can do that is Connectively.
• “Skyscraper” technique: you create an article and contact someone who links to its less in-depth, outdated version.
• Broken link building: you contact a site linking to a page that doesn’t exist anymore and suggest they link to you instead.
• Creating or sharing viral content on your site, for instance something the folks at Reddit would like.
• Making unique sources of data and statistics (case studies, researches, surveys).
• Creating your own non-stock images.
• Guest blogging.

The most efficient way to build links is to target specific sites where you want to create backlinks. And for that, you need to pick your targets first. Find the most authoritative sites in your niche through Google – or, even better, with WebCEO’s Dangerous Competitors tool.

This tool finds your competitors for your chosen keywords. They are not all going to be your direct business competitors, so you’ll want to cherry-pick the ones who are actually stealing your audience.

Make your site appear in no-click searches

Featured snippets, quick answers, Knowledge Panel, voice search. All of them can generate traffic, but they were mainly designed to give users the content they want without making them click. Even so, if you don’t appear in those search results, someone else will.

The same applies to pay-per-click ads. They occupy so much space above the organic results, it’s a wonder SEO is still relevant.

Fortunately, the requirements for getting featured snippets aren’t very strict – they boil down to using keywords and formatting your content in a distinct way (FAQ, list or table).

Share your content in social media

How else are you going to get traffic from there in the first place?

Still, not all of your social media followers will engage with your content. That’s why you need a large audience: the more followers you have, the better your chances. How do you get more?

• Share your business pages’ content on your own personal pages
• Ask the people you know to share it
• Reply to commenting users
• Reply to the users who PM you (and reply quickly)
• Ask users to comment, like, share and follow
• Be active on other people’s pages
• Share other people’s content on your pages

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Use email outreach

Remember how content comes in many more forms other than site pages? Email is another one of those forms. Quite powerful, too, even despite the risk of getting stuck in spam filters. If you are subscribed to somebody’s updates, you know how true this is.

How do you make this method work for you?

• Have a ton of email addresses in your database. You’ll be lucky if even 5% of them respond to your call to action. The wider the net you cast, the more fish you’ll catch.
• Don’t email to your competitors and irrelevant sites. If the addressees aren’t your target audience, your emails will fail.
• Design an email newsletter. There’s no better way to make your emails unique and your brand recognizable. Quick tip: you can use a free email templates builder to make this process very easy.
• Prepare several good pitches. Don’t just send everyone the same email. If you have options, some of them are certain to work better than others.
• Make new pitches when necessary. There can be all sorts of occasions: Halloween, Christmas, Easter, your site’s anniversary and so on. A special pitch for a special day is a good way to spice things up.

Afterword

It turns out there’s a lot of extra oomph your SEO needs to be effective. You will want to check if your content marketing strategy is working, too. How?

By checking these metrics in Google Analytics.

• Page views (how many times users visit your site)
• Click-through rates (% of users who visit your site after finding it)
• Bounce rates (% of users who leave your site after visiting one page)
• Dwell times (how much time users spend on your site)
• Page depth (how many pages users visit per session)
• User flow (how users browse through your site)
• Goals flow (how users reach your calls-to-action)
• Conversions (% of users who complete calls-to-action)

And, of course, the Google site rankings for your keywords. Those can be seen with WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool.

But the easiest way to tell if it’s all worked is to check your goals. The desired number of user registrations, the amount of profits, the ranking positions and so on – have you got them? And if you’ve gone above your hoped-for success numbers, how far above was it? If all your hard work has set a trend for growth, that’s how you will know you have become good at content marketing.

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The post Why Your SEO Strategy Isn’t Working (Hint: No Content Marketing) appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Old posts are forgotten sources of rich traffic. They can collect dust on the most ancient pages of your blog while you have no idea that they can shine bright on SERPs like a diamond again. 

Can’t believe it? Let me show proof from some famous names and figures: 

1. HubSpot declare that they increased the number of monthly organic search views of old posts they’ve optimized by an average of 106%.
2. According to Databox, niche experts state that 61-80% of their organic traffic comes from old blog posts.
3. Backlinko boosted the organic traffic to an old post by 260% in 14 days following the HubSpot experience (old but gold!).

See? That’s possible as long as you know what to do. 

It’s time to learn how to optimize your blog posts right so they will get you even more traffic than before.

Identify when and which old posts need optimization 

Let’s make this part easy to process and apply. There are four instances when you can see that some of your old posts might need refreshing and republishing: 

1. Trends Call You to Take Action

Trends come and go, get lost in history and then reappear in fashion years later. There is nothing to be surprised about if topics you wrote about several months/years ago seem to be trending right now. Different times call for different trends, but it’s always vitally important to have an edge on them in any possible way.

If you have ever written on topics that are getting their chance at the moment, make some time to refresh your posts and republish under the new date (just refresh the old post but not create a new one). This is beneficial for several reasons:

• You don’t have to spend a lot of time on your article since you already wrote most of what you will republish;
• You can rejoin the race for the top position as soon as the trend happens to rise and even get a featured snippet;
• You will enrich your semantic core with new keywords; an updated set of keywords will also help to revive articles that heretofore brought little or no traffic.

2. Traffic Seems to Never Calm Down or Rise Again

Great traffic is one of the reasons why we create content. At best we want it to always go up and up turning random readers into our customers or at least reliable readers. 

Popular longtime posts can be a successful method of bringing more traffic and that traffic can be properly regulated via updates in the content. What was interesting for people earlier will attract them later, even if it’s just curiosity.

Of course, don’t deny the opposite scenario: what wasn’t interesting for people earlier, may still have no chance to become a hit one day. However, you still shouldn’t give up without trying once more. Who knows what caused your old posts to not get rankings: wrong keywords, distracting events with similar keywords at the time, not enough content, temporarily bad website reputation… too many reasons to enumerate them all. But you can rectify them!

Let’s act step by step.

First, I would want to touch posts that have been rich in traffic since the day you posted them. You should first find out which posts were in high demand at the moment of their uploading and if they still maintain popularity among visitors. We can do this easily using the WebCEO Google Analytics Tool.

Here you can find out which posts of your blog were the most successful according to different parameters, such as quantity of clicks, number of times this page appeared on the SERPs (impressions), percentage of impressions which resulted in clicks (CTR), and average position of the page on the SERPs. Keep track of the green color which shows your success.

Then you should choose those old posts which have maintained their popularity through time and start the process of optimization. You can’t miss this opportunity. It is a great opportunity to make your old posts shine bright again.

Now let’s talk about the content that hasn’t really brought any traffic or has brought too little of it over time. 

First, analyze the topicality of such content. If there is no need for prospective customers to apply knowledge described there or even learn, then you could get rid of it without hurting your blog traffic. If the topic has already exhausted itself and has no value even for beginners, there is no need to keep it around. 

The second situation is more interesting though. There are cases when the topic you have written on was and is popular but you haven’t won traffic yet. That’s a pity, but it’s not over yet. These articles are easy to re-optimize!

After a while you can see more clearly what mistakes you made several years ago or what you forgot to optimize for the best results. The WebCEO Site Audit…

and Landing Page SEO tools will be of great help here.

All of your gained experience and knowledge will come in handy as well. Multiply the quality of your content with fresh skills and developments in SEO and – who knows – maybe this time you will blow past the competition.

How can this bring more traffic? Traffic = information-dependent people. They constantly look for high quality content they can use for their benefit. If you provide them with it and if you help them find your high-quality content, they will definitely stay with you longer.

3. Keywords Undergo Serious Problems

It won’t be breaking news if I say that keywords are a crucial thing in SEO. You can have great copy on your website but get bad rankings because you totally didn’t care about keywords earlier. 

I won’t demonstrate the importance of keywords. You can better learn about keyword power in other articles. 

Bad keyword research will eventually result in: 

1. Irrelevance of content, which is a serious problem that happens when you decide to use inappropriate keywords.
2. Bad search history. People use keywords when they try to find some information or product, and if you don’t have keywords that can bring those people to your page, then you will constantly be at the bottom of the search.
3. Poor traffic and rankings. You can have relevant keywords in your copy, but if they’re not placed right and with the right keyword density, you won’t get much traffic nor high positions. 

4. Users Leave Too Quickly

This can be the most serious problem. If people don’t like you despite great content (as you think of it), the right keywords and trendy topics, you are in trouble. Google will notice and not like the situation as well.

Why is this important? Because when you create content for people and they show up, their behavior on your website is noticed by search engines. It matters a lot.

If you see that people enter the pages of your website but leave too soon, then you have found an article or a page to rewrite or reoptimize to. Ask your Analytics Specialist to give you data on posts that receive little or almost no attention from readers and update them!

SO, let’s not call posts of days gone by just old, as it is better to say they are not fully optimized to the current needs of searchers. Now you can see them in an absolutely different light, with a new perspective, new ideas, and new methods of presenting.

How to optimize old blog posts

So, how to optimize your old blog posts after deciding which ones you want to revive?

There are some steps you should take:

1. Thorough Analysis

Optimizing your content is not only about writing. First, you need to conduct a comprehensive preparation.

You are not the only one who tracks all the trends. Your competitors are also on guard twenty-four seven. So, the first step to take after choosing the post and, respectively, niche is to analyze your competitors: who they are, how popular they are and whether they have similar posts:

• Check positions of these competing posts on the SERPs;
• Analyze deeply what they offer and how qualitative their content is;
• Understand how their content is somehow better than yours, if it is: points they have mentioned but you haven’t, keywords they have used and so on;
• Write better, taking into account each detail.

You should write as well as if it’s your last chance to create a new post. The more unique and well-developed content you present, the more people will come to you in the end.

There are a lot of  tools for blog post optimization and here is a tip for this step: the WebCEO Rank Tracking Tool which will help you to find your “most dangerous” competitors for your selected keywords.

If you don’t know who your real competitors are, this tool will also help you identify your dangerous competitors, some of whom aren’t directly competing for your customers but always win in searches for a particular set of keywords!

2. Keyword Research

The next step is one of the most important. Don’t forget that keywords in your posts help an audience to find you on Google and other search engines. A while ago, when you were writing the post for the first time, you already used keywords. Now you should check if those are still in demand and work for traffic. Maybe, you will need to change them into keywords that are more sought after at the moment.

Remember that it is better to use long-tail keywords, because they narrow search results down to a definite field and increase your chances to be found by a target audience. The better keyword combinations you make, the more chances of getting the highest positions in organic search results.

How can you do this?

Imagine you are in the shoes of a user who tries to find any information concerning your topic on the Internet. What would you type in a search box? What keywords would you choose to find exactly your website? The simplest, but most informative. For instance, let’s compare Google results for two different keywords, short-tail:

and long-tail:

Two very different sets of results. The first one shows you general information about the whole sphere, while the second one gives you concrete information concerning a definite topic in this sphere. Which is better in your opinion?

The moment you understand your potential visitor’s logic during a search process and link it with your blog through updated content will be the day you start winning. Always remember that users will not think about keywords you would choose for your article; they will type theirs and would like to find some results. You in turn are interested in being among those results.

Don’t be shy about using keywords your competitors chose. Your main goal is to be the first, so it means a bit of fighting on the SERPs for the highest position for certain keywords. They’ll do the same as soon as they understand that you are a decent rival. Just relax and use all your given opportunities.

Use multiple variations of keywords and their forms, for example not only word combinations or single words, but feel free to use questions and sentences and place them in the most important parts of your copy. 

Instead of conducting a time-wasting brain storming you can use a tip for this step: the WebCEO Keyword Research Tool which will help you to find the best keywords for your updated post:

and spy on those keywords your competitors use:

3. Rewriting, Structuring and Usage of Visual Media

After comprehensive analysis you can apply the following content optimization strategies and start the process of updating the stuff. You can either rewrite old stuff, by adding new points to the old text, or rewrite it from the ground up. However, it is always better to mainly just touch up the old content, because it already has backlinks and authority.

Here are points we want you to pay some attention to:

• Make sure to erase all outdated information. Present fresh and valuable content regarding old topics and your visitors will keep in mind that your source is always up-to-date and is worth their attention and further visiting.
• Some time ago, information you presented to a wide audience was informative and interesting for a specific group of people. It is worth checking if the situation has changed or not. In case it has and your targeted audience has become wider or smaller, e.g. extending of users’ age frames, interests, kinds of activity, etc., it would be better to change a little bit of your style of writing. 
• Make it simple and understandable for everybody in the current environment if it’s not so already. People will feel comfortable learning new information from your blog. Even if it sounds like a “Guide for Dummies” after you make some changes – the simpler, the better: not all of us are academicians or multi-specialists.
• Take all new information only from trustworthy sources to be accurate in data and knowledge. Not only will the sources you use win, but people also will see that your blog is trustworthy too and, as a result, worth visiting and linking to.
• Make the “appearance” of your content more attractive and interesting. Add some appropriate videos, pictures, PDF guides (if needed) and infographics. The latter is really useful when your post contains a lot of complex information which can’t be remembered fast and understood easily. 

Moreover, as infographics are kind of a popular strategy of presenting difficult information in a simple way, they are often widely spread among audience members. You will then get even more points in vertical search results which means better traffic.

• If your post is big in size and covers a lot of information, it is better to structure it, if you haven’t done that yet. Headings, sub-headings, paragraphs, bullet points, table of contents and other structural components are really helpful in navigating. Add keywords in these sections, so you will be easy-to-find, even for specific blocks of information. 

Otherwise, seeing a non-structured post with an enormous amount of words, people will just go away and you will never get more traffic this way.

• Being used by Google as a Featured Snippet is also a thing you should take into account while rewriting old content. If information you want to present is of an “answers type”, i.e. provides information regarding a specific problem in the form of an extended answer, it is better to structure it in the form of a direct and accurate answer. That will increase your chances of being chosen by Google for Position Zero.

Here’s a tip: the WebCEO Rank Tracking Tool will show your positions in vertical search results and tell you if a website has a Featured Snippet in Google’s results for a specific keyword, including Position Zero.

4. Internal Links Optimization and Technical Audit

After finishing work with the content part, it is necessary to work on everything that can influence your positions on the SERP and affect a user’s impression of you.

Internal Links are no less important than the above mentioned steps in the process of revitalizing your old content. A blog post is not only a block of information you provide. It is also a small detail of a big puzzle. When a user wants to dive into other related topics, it is really useful to put them on your post page as links. Bringing related content to your visitors is an extra chance for you to keep them longer on your website. You can place those links as anchors inside your text which is really helpful during reading, or in the form of a list of links.

If you chose the first variant, make sure your anchor texts are relevant, understandable, and working.

Don’t forget to check whether old links work properly and lead to targeted websites. Old posts sometimes are full of links that are not working anymore.

A tip for this step: the WebCEO Internal Links Tool which will help you to keep track of link texts, evaluate their value and check if those links are blocked or have a nofollow status. It will also provide you with information regarding page authority.

Technical audits are another important part of your renovated posts’ SEO optimization, so we can’t just forget about this. You have to be aware of all issues and errors on your blog’s pages. It is better when you don’t have them. Google likes it when everything works as well as it can. So, any server issues, slow access to the page, not found page, broken links, images, and other errors must not be associated with your blog and especially with the page containing your renovated post.

A tip for this step: the WebCEO Site Audit Tool with which you will always be alerted about issues on your website which should be fixed.

5. SEO 

At this stage you have to check if you have any on-site issues, e.g. problems with tags, descriptions, URL’s structure, Redirects, robots.txt file, etc., problems with mobile-friendliness, sitemap, and page speed.

You have to make sure you have optimized each of the elements you are able to:

1. Meta tags and descriptions: The title tag, meta description, H1 tag and ALT tags are also segments you have to keep track of and update; the Title, Description and H1 are what readers notice first, it makes sense to optimize them with keywords and intriguing introduction.

Remember that you have to check the length of a page’s metadata: the title tag should be of 50-60 characters with a meta description of up to 155 characters; always check the mobile version of your description, it can be reduced in mobile search, so try to be to-the-point and short. 

2. Structured data: depending on the type of the article, you can use specific methods to present your content better in search results and get more customers and readers. 

For example,

• If you write recipes you can apply structured data for them and get your content presented like this on the SERP:

You can eventually get into the Carousel which is seen like this:

• A simple article can also get a new lease on life if you decide to equip it with structured data. The process is tough, but we are sure you can handle it and get featured in the news carousel or appear in the featured snippet on the SERP!

• Unwritten content hasn’t been left without attention. If you produce podcasts or create videos they also have right to land at the top of search results. 

Your podcasts can appear on the SERP and – for the readers’ comfort – be played right there. Just read some instructions from Google and start your way! 

Videos can also be optimized from this point of view. You can set a Live badge, Item List or set timecodes so users will find moments they are interested in faster! 

• NEW! Google has introduced Speakable structured data, in Beta for now. If you want some of your text parts to be audited by Google Assistant, you can implement this (only for the USA at the moment). But read Google’s guidelines carefully regarding content that you want to be audited. 

N/B: In 2020 more than 50% of visits came from mobile devices, that’s why you should pay enough attention to mobile optimization in order to perform well everywhere. Make it comfortable to read texts, look at pictures and watch videos on mobile screens.

A tip for this step: the WebCEO Rank Tracking Tool which will help you to find the types of results you’re not getting and need to work on.

6. CTAs

A lot of bloggers use CTAs on their blogs to convert visitors into customers. There are many kinds of CTAs, e.g. end-of-post banner, slide-in, pop-up, sidebar, etc., and everybody should be careful to choose the right one. Sometimes people go way too far with this mission, irritating visitors and sometimes unnecessarily taking them away from a website. Be careful with pop-ups, because they not only block your content, but also influence page speed and strongly affect your readers’ impressions. You can place a simple end-of-post banner CTA and give visitors an opportunity to get to know you and then buy your product/visit some pages/subscribe to you with greater comfort and desire.

Here is an example of this from WebCEO:

7. Content Promotion

There are many ways you can promote your updated posts. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Traffic comes with backlinks. And you obviously should use some winning link building strategies to get traffic:

1. If you create a new post, it is necessary to track the backlinks of the old version of your post. You can easily do this with the WebCEO My Backlinks Tool. After detecting all the backlinks, you can write to webmasters and politely ask them to change the old link to a new one with a better link text.

1. One of the most appropriate strategies in this case is the Skyscraper Technique. It isn’t simple, but it pays great dividends. You can track who links to competitor websites regarding a chosen topic and politely propose your content to website owners instead of what now exists on their website. Remember, that your content should be much better from the beginning to the end. Otherwise, the answer for your request will be negative.
2. You can build a link from broken ones. This is an easy tactic to use if you know websites with broken links to content of the same niche. Just run a technical site audit on a blog or site you want to get a backlink from. If you find a broken link, politely inform the site’s webmaster that the link is broken and they can now link to your article from your blog instead, for instance. This method can be applied if you have infographics in a newer version of your post. They are very popular and in demand. Just find a source where similar content is posted and politely offer them your infographic with a link to your page where it resides. If it’s made well enough, you are unlikely to get a negative answer.
3. Take part in link round-ups. If your content is made well, your link can be posted on a website with a high domain authority – even on a popular one like Reddit.
4. Ask friends who have websites to post your link, so that you can receive more traffic.
5. Link exchanges are pretty simple. Your link is posted if you post somebody’s. Remember that Google doesn’t like this method and your websites darn well better be complementary to each other in some way. Do not do this with strangers whose reputation you do not know.

If you want and have enough time, you can learn more about link building strategies.

Next, social media will always be that very source where you can gain a lot of viewers. Even though Google doesn’t count them, such social media as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter will always be places for thousands of people who are interested in different spheres. Some of them can be your potential clients who are just waiting for new content to explore. It is pretty easy to use them and get a result. Some public pages and groups post content if it’s relevant and don’t ask for money. In this case your content has to be really catchy, interesting, well-written, and fresh.

However, if you want to use your own social media accounts and they are not so popular, this method will not be effective. If you haven’t yet built a social media following, you may have to use paid promotion, or use social media tools such as IG growth tools to get a head start.

You can also use the WebCEO Content Submission Tool, which offers variants on where to post your content.

IN CONCLUSION, old posts can be brought to life and serve you at least one more time. With greater content optimization, their success may be even bigger than it was for the first time. Don’t hesitate to use all possible means, except for those which may damage your website’s rankings. Bring more traffic to your website by fixing old mistakes and coming up with an updated and better version of content which was already created in the past.

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The post How to Optimize Old Blog Posts for Better SEO & Traffic appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Some editors-in-chief want pictures of Spiderman. Others just want as much publicity for their news as possible. Whichever type you are, there’s one undeniable truth: if you run a news website, SEO is required to conquer the world of online journalism.

And this post, which describes SEO for news sites, is the lottery card you’ve been looking for. Are you ready to start winning the traffic sweepstakes? Read on.

Get 23 tools for your news SEO: Sign Up Free

1. Make your site easy to browse

News sites take in the info about every interesting event in the world. As a byproduct of this mission, they end up with thousands of pages, all of which need to be organized. What happens when they aren’t organized? Visitors get lost, link juice doesn’t flow, the site doesn’t rank, and your employers hire a more competent SEO specialist. Nobody is left happy!

So the first milestone is to avoid making a mess on your own news aggregator. You can do it by ensuring the site has the following things:

• Search bar. This is a must-have on any site with a great number of pages. Help users quickly find articles on the topics that interest them.
• Pagination or infinite scroll. Each is better than the other in its own way, but you can’t run a news site without one of the two. You will have so much content that you’ll need to display it to users in bits.
• Categories and tags. Use them to group together articles on related topics. They are also good for SEO: links to category and tag pages have anchor texts relevant to your site. You can also include those links in a navigation bar.
• Breadcrumbs. A line with two links – one to the home page, the other to the news category – is enough to make browsing a bit easier.

These will ensure your visitors can quickly find any content they want and jump between the site’s pages. What else does your news website need?

• Create a sitemap. All your news articles must be indexed by Google or they won’t appear in its search results. Use WebCEO’s Sitemap Generation tool to create one and be sure it’s updated regularly.
• Link your articles between each other. If users see a link that catches their attention, they’ll click on it and spend more time on your site, which is always good. It will also help your articles gain authority and push them higher in Google’s SERPs.

2. Optimize your news site

On-page SEO for news sites is pretty straightforward. All you need is high-quality articles that are optimized both for users and search engines. A news portal is essentially just a very big blog. Do you remember how to optimize blogs? There you have it.

If SEO is all Greek to you, don’t worry! This post is meant to help with your news site optimization, after all.

Find keywords, pronto!

“Strike while the iron is hot” applies to news like nothing else. You have to act quickly, or other sites will report first and steal your audience. Be fast when writing your articles, and be even faster when optimizing them!

Fortunately, if you need keywords for a news website, WebCEO’s Keyword Research tool is a solid choice both in terms of speed and quality.

Find high-ranking keywords for your news articles: Sign Up Free

Keywords are to be placed in:

• Page titles. And since they are titles of news articles, they need to be eye-catching, clickable and contain power words. Fortunately, this niche thrives on clickbait titles, so you have a lot of room for maneuver.
• Meta descriptions. They work as follow-ups for titles, so they should fulfil the same purpose and be just as eye-catching.
• Page URLs. A link you can read and understand looks much more trustworthy than a random string of symbols. Many content management systems automatically generate default URLs for new pages; instead of using those, write your own URLs.
• H1-H4 headings. These help both Google and the readers to understand the content of your news articles.
• Images’ filenames and ALT attributes. Filling these out helps your site to be found in Google image search, and properly written ALT attributes can be used as an alternative for images.
• Anchor texts of links to other articles. It will help the articles rank for those keywords a little higher.

Use shareable images

Text-only news sites are a thing, and they are more popular than one would expect. However, pictures are an indispensable part of the user experience and, in fact, the Internet as a whole. Should you sacrifice the user experience for a boost in website loading speed? You be the judge.

If you decide to keep images on your news site, then you better incorporate them in your SEO. You will be using a lot of images, and you don’t want them to be a strain on your loading speed. Keep their file size to a minimum.

• Save them in the right format
• Adjust their height and width to fit the page
• Merge consecutive images when appropriate
• Compress them

It’s usual for different news sites to use the same hero images, but you’ll do much better with unique ones. Users are more likely to share your article in social media when it has a hero image they’ve never seen before.

Avoid duplicate content

Duplicate content is the bane of news websites. Google filters out plagiarized content from its search results; if your articles aren’t original, users might never find them organically. The temptation to publish news as soon as possible may be strong, but you just have to fight it and not copy news articles from other sites.

But let’s say you couldn’t avoid it. How do you recover from the damage?

• Edit your content to make it unique
• Set up 301 redirects leading to the original article
• Use the rel=”canonical” attribute to point to the original

And for the last content-related tip: when news receives an update, don’t create a new page. Add the new information in the existing article instead.

3. Keep your site operational

If you want to keep your readers updated on the world’s hottest events, your site needs to run like clockwork. Every bug, every error takes away from user experience and makes readers less eager to be your users. How do you avoid the embarrassment and help your news site run smoothly?

Improve your site loading speed

Speed converts to heat. Therefore, fast news is the hottest! Be the first to tell users about the latest events, both figuratively and literally: Google ranks fast-loading sites higher.

Increasing your loading speed is a matter of doing many small things, each with only a minor effect on its own. If you want to make a noticeable difference, you will need to do them all. In no particular order:

• Optimize your images;
• Minimize your page code;
• Use fewer redirects – or better yet, don’t use them at all;
• Host your news site on a fast server or a content delivery network;
• Use Accelerated Mobile Pages to create very fast-loading versions of your articles.

Test your site with WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool and see what you can improve.

Hot news need hottest loading speed: Sign Up Free

Make your site mobile-friendly

Even though reading on a handheld device while scrolling with your finger feels more like reading a book than a newspaper, news still goes quite well with mobile. And it has to, because Google’s mobile-first index is as unforgiving as its desktop predecessor. If your news site can’t provide a good mobile user experience, don’t expect high rankings.

Fortunately, optimizing your site for mobile isn’t too hard. You will just need to make it display well on small screens.

• Implement a responsive design;
• Use large fonts – 16 pt. or larger;
• Say no to obstructing popups (exceptions: sensitive content warning, age verification, asking permission to use cookies);
• Leave space between lines and paragraphs of text, images, buttons and other page elements;
• Load quickly.

Scan your site with WebCEO’s Mobile Optimization tool (which can be found right next to the Speed Optimization tool) and see if you could make your news portal more mobile-friendly.

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Fix technical errors

Depending on how many articles you plan to release daily, your news portal could be a very prolific source of user traffic; traffic that you risk losing, if you get technical errors and just leave them unchecked.

At least once a week, audit your site for errors with WebCEO’s Technical Audit tool. Once you’ve found the errors, fix them.

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4. Build relevant links

Your news portal is going to need backlinks, same as every other site. Where can you get them?

• Blogs. Another easy way to make a backlink is to cite your news article somewhere as a source. It can be your own blog, or you can write a guest post for somebody, or just post a non-spammy link somewhere in comments. Same as above, mind both quality and quantity.
• Content directories. You can submit your news articles to specialized directories. They tend to have a high domain authority, so backlinks from them can give you a tremendous ranking boost. Some of those directories can be found in WebCEO’s Content Submission tool.
• Forums. It’s hard to find a forum that doesn’t have a section for news threads. Easy all-you-can-have backlinks! Just be mindful of their quality and try not to make too many of them at once. Keep an eye on your link profile in WebCEO’s My Backlinks tool.

Check who links to your news: Sign Up Free

Note that Google expects you to have at least 20% nofollow links to look like a natural website, so it’s definitely not a waste of time to show Google you’re getting nofollow links from authoritative sites.

5. Use social media

Can you imagine running a news site and not posting news on your own social media channels? That just screams incompetence, doesn’t it?

Social platforms are very news-friendly. Coupled with news portals, they almost always form a healthy, mutually beneficial relationship – especially with their owner’s help. So what can you do to help it grow?

The most basic rule is to post often and consistently. Here are the other rules, each of which deserves a detailed explanation.

Be present everywhere

How many social platforms can you name from the top of your head? That’s how many you should use for sharing your news articles – and then some more. The most popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube would be anyone’s first choice, but of course, there are plenty of others.

Bottom line: cast a wide net and build your presence everywhere you can. You should be getting at least 25% of your traffic from social media anyway.

Once you’ve made the social media pages and have been using them for some time, you’ll want to know how well they are performing and if your social media strategy needs improvement. You can judge this by the user engagement: the more upvotes, comments and shares you get for your posts, the better. Count them all quickly with WebCEO’s Social Engagement tool.

It helps to compare your pages’ performance to that of your competitors’ pages in social media, too. If they are getting more engagement, you might want to take a look at what works for them and start doing that, too.

Measure your competitors’ social engagement with WebCEO’s Competitor Social Citations.

Find the best times to post

Your readers aren’t online 24/7. If you post to social media whenever, your updates will most likely get buried in the readers’ feed under countless other posts.

Fortunately, the best times to post have been thoroughly studied. For news portals, these are the best hours (in your local time) and days to post on some of the most popular social platforms.

Facebook:

• Best times: 8 AM – 1 PM
• Best days: Mondays through Fridays

YouTube:

• Best times: 2-4 PM on weekdays, 9-11 AM on weekends
• Best days: Friday, Saturday, Sunday

Instagram:

• Best times: 8 AM – 1 PM
• Best day: Wednesday

Twitter:

• Best times: 9 AM – 12 PM
• Best days: Wednesday, Friday

LinkedIn:

• Best times: 10 AM – 3 PM
• Best days: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday

TikTok:

• Best times: Tuesdays 2–3 PM, Wednesdays and Thursdays 1–3 PM
• Best days: Wednesday, Thursday

Of course, there’s always a chance it might be different for your own site. Better play it safe and look through your Google Analytics data for the times you are getting the most visitors – and then post at those times.

Link to your social pages from your site

Make it easy for readers to find you in social media. The easiest way is, of course, through your news portal. Most sites do it by putting links to their social pages in the footer or upper corner. Despite often being placed at the very bottom of websites, those links work: people are used to them being there, so they will scroll down without hesitation. If they find no social media icons, they may decide you aren’t seriously in business.

Remember to put icons of social platform logos next to the links – or just use the icons themselves as the links.

Implement buttons to share your articles in social media

Copying the post’s URL, opening a new tab for Facebook, pasting the URL… Call me lazy, but don’t you think there are a tad too many steps? If sharing a news article can be done with a single press of a button, that’s certainly the more preferable choice.

If you want readers to share your articles (and you do), make it easy and quick.

Sites made in WordPress have it nice: just install a plugin, and the job is done. Easiest part of WordPress SEO hands down. Something like WP Social Sharing will make it look like this:

It might be more difficult for non-WordPress sites, but those buttons are worth the effort to put up.

6. Get featured in Google News

Ranking high in Google is already a huge victory. News articles may be granted an even greater honor: being featured in Google News. What makes it such a big deal? Simply the fact that Google News articles often appear in featured snippets, as well as get over 380,000,000 visits per month.

In order to get a slice of that monster pie, you will have to fulfil a long list of requirements.

1. Be a news site. Quite obviously, news is the sole type of content accepted by Google News.

2. Submit your site to Google News. This is the next step that must be done before all other steps in this list! Once you’ve submitted your site, verified your ownership and requested inclusion, you can begin to optimize it for Google News.

3. Descriptive URLs. The majority of articles featured in Google News have URLs you can read. They tell users what your content is about straight away.

4. No errors in the text. Always proofread your articles to ensure their grammar, punctuation and syntax are perfect.

5. Post about events in your country. If an American news portal reports about something in California, Google News will show it. The same article from a British site won’t be so lucky. Incidentally, this step happens to be local SEO-friendly.

6. Use images and video. At the very least, your article should have a hero image. Additional photos and videos increase your chances.

7. Be mobile-friendly. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Google News favors content that can rank high in Google’s mobile-first index.

8. Fast loading speed. A low page load time is always a plus, besides the fact that it’s a ranking factor. It’s also crucial for articles you want to submit to Google News. You’ll have even better chances if you make your site load quickly by using the next point in our list…

9. Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP is a Google-run project, so they naturally approve of sites that are using it. Indeed, many news articles in Google News are made in AMP.

10. Follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Respect Google’s rules, and you will receive respect in return.

11. Follow Google’s Content Policies. Google News prohibits certain kinds of content: graphic, hateful, illegal and others. See the full list here.

12. Post news on your site under a subcategory. The subcategory can be anything the news article is related to, such as /politics/ or /sports/, or even plain old /story/ or /article/. In other words, your articles should have URLs like https://newsportal.com/news/article.

13. Create a unique sitemap for Google News content. Google has detailed instructions for creating and validating news sitemaps, which you can view on their site.

14. Use appropriate article structured data. Schema.org has markup for every kind of content, and news is no exception. With snippets code in each article, you can wind up at the coveted Position Zero with the first paragraph of your article and your hero image displayed on the Google results page itself, above the first organic result for a keyword and often above even the Google ads.

Google starts reviewing your news site for inclusion as soon as you submit it. The majority of the steps in the list above are for making your site a more viable candidate. But even if you aren’t accepted, this instruction is meant to raise your site’s visibility with Google and its content’s overall quality, which is always a good thing for your rankings.

The post How to Do SEO for News Websites in 6 Essential Steps appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Ecommerce is huge all over the world. Wanting to sell things online is a healthy ambition, with more than just a promise of making you richer. However, because ecommerce is so massive, your competition is going to be just as enormous. You will probably compete against titans like Amazon, and even smaller stores may provide a challenge.

It certainly helps to be an ace businessman – even better when you have an expert business consultant, but it won’t be enough. Your online store will never make it big if it can’t be found on the first page of Google. That’s why ecommerce and SEO go hand in hand – and that’s why we’ve made this giude about how to do SEO for ecommerce websites. Are you excited? Then let’s proceed!

1. Find keywords that sell

In the beginning was the keyword. Where do you start looking for keywords? Try the names of the products you are selling and their categories. There are two requirements your keywords should fulfil:

• Act like a magnet for potential customers;
• Give you a decent chance to outrank your competitors.

Obviously, not all keywords will be up for the task. Some will be too short and too vague to attract the kind of users you need (i.e. buyers). Smart SEOs rely on keywords that both sound specific and are searched in Google often enough to attract a large number of visitors. This awesome breed of keywords is called long-tail.

Where can you find long-tail keywords?

• The first place to look is WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool. Simply type in your own ideas for keywords, and you will see their search volume – the higher, the better. The tool will also display a list of keywords similar to yours. You can even receive a list of searched-for keywords that have the same common root words. Choose the suggestions that suit your goals the best.
• Keyword-finding sites like Soovle and AnswerThePublic offer a wide variety of long-tail keywords, although they don’t measure search volume.
• Big competitor sites like Amazon and Shopify are the ecommerce giants, as they have the largest audiences and more searches on their sites than anyone else in the business. That’s why you can use their search bars to check the auto generated phrases based on what customers usually type in before buying. Here’s an example: let’s say you sell pillows on your site. Go to Amazon.com, type “pillow” in their search bar, and voila!

Once you’ve prepared a list of keywords, it’s time to optimize your site. In order to make your pages rank high, use keywords in these places:

• URLs
• Title tags
• Meta description tags
• H1-H4 header tags
• Image titles and ALT tags
• Product descriptions

Make sure your site’s pages have those places! If search engines can’t scan them for keywords, those pages will sink lower to the deepest bottom of search results. Audit your site with WebCEO’s On-Page Issues tool to avoid squandering your SEO potential.

Also, product descriptions need special care. Each of them has to be unique if you want them to appear in search results; if they aren’t unique, Google will filter them out. The descriptions should also include words and terms that are often used with the page’s subject (i.e. what you sell). And last but not least, write product descriptions in such a way that will convince the visitor to make a purchase after reading.

2. Interlink your store’s pages

To say that ecommerce sites tend to have a lot of pages is an understatement. For example, Amazon’s product selection is measured in hundreds of millions. That’s why online stores must be a breeze to navigate, or else customers will find a more user-friendly place. In order to make your site easy to browse and use, its pages need to be linked between each other in the most efficient way possible.

Most ecommerce sites are structured like this: main page -> product category -> subcategory -> product. As a rule of thumb, the “link distance” between any two given pages shouldn’t be more than three clicks, and this example of an ecommerce site layout follows this rule (even better when you don’t have subcategories). You can make your online store even easier to use if you follow these tips:

• Put a link to the main page on every other page. The best place for it is the store’s logo in the top part of the page. The logo’s ALT tag will be considered as the all-important link text to the home page.
• Create a navigation bar. Online stores benefit the most from navigation bars that collapse into menus, providing users with fast and easy access to product categories.
• Use breadcrumbs. They take little space and help users avoid getting lost on your site. Breadcrumbs for websites look like this:

• Don’t use pagination. Many online stores have pagination, and it’s often generated automatically by the platform used to create the store. However, it isn’t the most user-friendly option because it takes time to load new pages. Instead, make a “Load more items” button that will add more products on the page when pressed. This option is better than infinite scrolling, too.

There’s also the matter of products that permanently go out of stock. Don’t delete pages belonging to such products; they can still be of use. One option is to redirect these pages to their categories or similar products. Another is to replace their content with a message that will convince visitors to keep browsing. The same kind of content will prove useful for your 404 error page.

3. Enhance your site with schema markup

No ecommerce SEO strategy can do without structured data. Why does it matter so much? Structured data helps Google understand the content of web pages better. When a page is marked up with a schema, Google can display additional information about it in search results, which is immensely useful for potential customers. Marked-up pages receive many more clicks from users than ordinary ones, so I highly recommend you learn how to use structured data.

Review schema is especially important for an ecommerce site. It displays customer feedback right in search results, convincing users about the quality of your products.

4. Make your online store secure

How important is online security? You’ve probably heard about the scandal surrounding Facebook and its data leaks. Incidents like this are a disaster for all parties involved: users are put in danger when their sensitive information falls into the wrong hands, and the website’s stock and reputation may tank beyond recovery. Take online security seriously – especially when it comes to SEO for online stores.

Customers must feel safe when they use your website; make it as safe for them as possible. Here’s what you can do to make your site secure:

• Switch over to HTTPS. If you haven’t done this already and your site is still on HTTP, you should see to this as soon as you can. Security isn’t the only reason: when browsers display a page with the HTTP protocol, they mark it as “not secure” next to the URL address bar. Users see that and prefer to leave the page rather than risk their information being stolen.
• Use a content delivery network. Many CDNs have safeguard measures against dangers like cyber-attacks and server failure. Many, but not all! Be sure to choose the most secure CDN you can afford.
• Keep your plugins up to date. If you use plugins on your site, you should update them as soon as their new versions are released. This is because older versions of plugins tend to have vulnerabilities that hackers may exploit to gain access to your site. Of course, that doesn’t mean the newest versions are completely free of holes. But they are still safer because their weaknesses might not be known to hackers yet.

5. Index your ecommerce site’s pages

One of the most embarrassing mistakes you can do is forget to check if your site’s pages are indexed by Google. If they aren’t in the index, they will not appear in search results, period. Naturally, this means customers can’t find you online, and all the work you’ve done on your site will go to waste. Make sure this never happens to you by generating a sitemap of your store and submitting it to Google.

The fastest way to create a sitemap is with WebCEO’s Sitemap Generator tool. If you haven’t made one yet, follow these steps. If you’ve made a sitemap but haven’t submitted it yet, skip to step 6.

1. Click on Settings.
2. Choose Create the sitemap file from scratch.
3. Press Start. The tool will now begin scanning your site.
4. Download the sitemap file when the tool stops scanning.
5. Upload the sitemap file on your site.
6. Return to WebCEO’s Sitemap Generator and click on Settings
7. Choose Submit to search engines the already existing sitemap file.
8. Type in your sitemap’s URL address.
9. Press Start.

Done! Now search engines know about the pages on your site and will show them in search results.

Here’s a very important part: a single sitemap can list up to 50,000 pages. It isn’t rare for ecommerce sites to go above this limit. If your site has more than 50,000 pages, you’ll need to create multiple sitemaps to index everything. Fortunately, WebCEO’s Sitemap Generator automatically creates multiple sitemaps when necessary. Be careful not to miss any when you are submitting them.

6. Make your store mobile-friendly

Mobile Internet has the majority of search queries, and now it’s been reinforced with Google’s mobile-first index. How does this affect SEO for ecommerce sites? Simple: if your online store isn’t mobile-friendly and works fine only on desktop PCs, you’ll miss out on a massive crowd of customers. What can you do to keep them on your site?

• Use a responsive design. A website designed in this way will automatically shuffle and size its page elements around to fit any screen.
• Use large, easy-to-read fonts. Zooming in and out on a mobile screen is easy, but it wastes time the users would rather spend viewing the content.
• Use negative space. The smaller the screen, the worse cluttered pages look on it. Shorter paragraphs are easier to read, and some room between elements will prevent users from accidentally pressing a wrong button or checkbox.
• Avoid using intrusive interstitials. That includes advertisements, banners and popups that cover too much on the screen, making the site unusable. If you need to have interstitials, they should be small and easy to close. Some types of intrusive interstitials are A-Okay: content warning, age verification and “use of cookies”.
• Make sure your redirects work. If your site’s mobile version is on a separate URL, be careful while setting up redirects between them. A desktop web page should always lead to its mobile counterpart, and vice versa.
• Make your website load fast. Users like it when you don’t keep them waiting. Improve your website speed, and they’ll be more eager to look around on your site and become your customers. Page load time affects a site’s rankings, as well.

Run a test on your site in WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool (in the Mobile tab) and see how well it’s doing.

7. Start a blog on your site

SEO aside, a good ecommerce site must be able to close a sale quickly. If a page takes its time to convince a visitor to buy, it’s not going to work; visitors would rather just get what they came for and move on. That’s why it’s better to leave long-winded descriptions of your products to pages that aren’t directly involved in sales. That’s right: this part of online shop SEO is better suited for a blog.

A blog post with interesting and valuable information can be a prolific source of extra traffic, especially when written by a marketer who knows how to sell her product. Social media may amplify the effect even further, so enable the option to share your posts.

8. Build links to your online shop

Link building does more than just move your website up in rankings. Backlinks bring you users from other sites. They also help you grow your store’s authority and reputation. That’s only if they are quality backlinks, of course. So what can you do to earn them?

• The obvious way: Create valuable content on your website. Google’s goal is to make the best pieces of content easy to find, so only this kind of content gets the most backlinks. Prioritize value for users when you work on your site’s pages, and you are off to a good start. An example of valuable content on an ecommerce site is a discount offer or a tutorial.
• The most powerful way: Share your content on social media. Although links made on social platforms don’t usually pass authority, they get tons of views there – and that means they are so much more likely to become dofollow backlinks on other sites. Social media captures 30% of the time users spend online. Let that number sink in and start using it to your advantage.
• The easiest way: See who links to your competitors and look for opportunities there. You can bring up a full list of your competitors’ backlinks with WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy tool.
• The expert way: Help reporters write articles. Ecommerce, business and online shopping are popular topics, and you can get your site mentioned in some of them. Sign up on Connectively and similar websites as a source to find reporters in need.
• The friendly way: Find unlinked mentions of your store. Use WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring tool to find out who says your good name. If you find a mention with nothing but bare text, contact the person who wrote about you and ask them to include a link.
• The real-world way: Set up listings on business directories. This helps when your store is not just a website on the Internet, but also an actual place where customers set their feet. In this case, you’ll want your store to be easily found online, and that’s where the business directories come in. Create listings on Google My Business and other directories that are relevant to your line of work. Going local can capture an extremely large market of online buyers even if they don’t care where products will be shipped from.

And don’t forget that not all backlinks are good for you. Scan your backlinks with WebCEO’s Toxic Pages tool to keep your website safe from any bad apples.

9. Audit your site for errors

If there’s a niche where you cannot afford to let your users down, that’s ecommerce. Site errors may paralyze your business or even hurt your customers’ wallets. That’s a lot of responsibility on a single website! Fix technical issues of any sort as soon as you notice them.

Find errors on your site with WebCEO’s Site Audit tool. It can help you detect problems ranging from a broken image to server malfunction. Stay vigilant and scan regularly – or use the WebCEO Alerts tool to get emails whenever something on your site breaks.

10. Monitor your rankings and traffic

Since you’ve already done so much SEO for your online store, there’s no point in stopping halfway. Aren’t you curious to know how well you’ve performed? You may have improved your rankings, but they are a fickle thing. Every SEO worth their salt knows that rankings should be checked regularly.

That’s why you have SEO tools. There’s no better way to keep track of the changes in rankings. Boot up WebCEO’s Site Rankings tool, punch the keywords into the Settings and enjoy the view.

Why watch your rankings at all? For one, to feel proud of yourself. If you are driven by more than just optimism, then you might also expect the rankings to fall at some point. It might indeed happen, many times. A drop in rankings is a certain signal to double down on SEO; in a worst-case scenario, it could be because Google gave you a penalty. So spend a few minutes at least once per week to scan your site.

The exact same things can be said about user traffic. Keep an eye on its fluctuations with WebCEO’s Web Analytics toolset.

BONUS Tip. Convert your organic traffic like a pro

Quick refresher: conversion means the users visiting your page AND performing the action you want, like buying. Conversion rates are measured in percentage. For example: number of buyers divided by number of visitors times 100%.

As you can imagine, online stores live or die by their conversion rates. Naturally, you want yours to be at their highest, and that’s a good reason to invest your effort into conversion rate optimization (CRO for short).

Conversion rate optimization benefits any site where users perform money-making actions. In case with ecommerce websites, you want to focus on these points:

• Making your pages more user-friendly. Less headache for users means they’ll be more likely to place an order. Make sure your site displays everything a user would need in the first scroll, especially on mobile devices. By the way, is your ecommerce site mobile-friendly?
• Well-placed, eye catching calls-to-action. Strong colors are encouraged, but don’t overdo it. And if you have special offers? Even better.
• Well-placed user testimonials. Words of praise from other customers will make newcomers feel safer. Their experience is the fruit of your labor – share it.
• Simple forms with few form fields. Less is more, at least at first. If you need a ton of information from your customer to prepare their order (which is often the case), don’t hit them with a dozen fields to fill out at once.
• Use online chat software on your site. If you feel lost, here’s the Top 10 Best Live Chat Software Solutions Compared.

Google Analytics remains the best (and completely free) tool for tracking your campaigns’ conversions. It’s even integrated in WebCEO – and we absolutely recommend connecting your Google Analytics account to your WebCEO project. You will receive the same data faster and in a much more user-friendly interface, plus quick access to other SEO reports for your ecommerce site.

Now you’ve ensured high search engine rankings and targeted visitor traffic to your site. Congratulations, you’ve nailed SEO for ecommerce websites!

Engage visitors on your site and convert this traffic well. Otherwise people will come and go, and Google will think that your site is not relevant enough to the queries that have brought people to your site organically.

Begin Your eCommerce SEO Sign up Free

The post SEO for Ecommerce Websites: 10-Step Guide for Your Online Store appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.