In this day and age, it’s hard to find a business that doesn’t have its own website – literally. No online presence means no customers. Modern businesses are completely dependent on the Internet, and it’s especially true for small businesses which have to compete with giants in their industry.

But if you have a website, you are off to a great start. All you need to do is make yourself more visible on the Web – through the means of small business SEO. The path is long, but nothing you can’t handle. Now, what makes a good SEO strategy for small businesses?

1. Create content for your target audience

If you are a pro, this should be a piece of cake for you.

Before everything else, there is content. Websites live or die by it. Your site’s purpose is to convince potential customers that you have what they need; therefore, your site must have every bit of relevant and useful information.

For example, a website for a dentist clinic would benefit greatly from detailed descriptions of each provided service. They would convince visiting users that the clinic is run by professionals who know their job, as well as assist in picking the service they really need. What’s more, detailed information is a direct signal to search engines: this website is actually useful and deserves a ranking boost.

In short: figure out what sort of information your customers need and put it on your website.

2. Find and use keywords

Type a few words in Google search, and websites will appear. You want yours to be there, too – and on page #1. How to make it happen?

It starts with finding the right keywords (for using on your site). But how can you tell the right keywords from wrong?

• They are not too short, simple or vague. Only the most famous businesses can rank for keywords like those. (Examples of what not to use: donuts or tasty donuts.)
• They are descriptive and specific. For example: healthy gluten-free donuts. But we can still do better:
• They reflect user search intent. For example: healthy gluten-free donuts delivery. With a keyword like this, it’s impossible to mistake what the users want when they type it.
• They include words like near me, closest, in (city). Location-based keywords are especially important for small businesses.
• They have a decent number of monthly searches. You want at least a few hundred per month.

So how do you find the keywords you need for your small business? With SEO tools, of course. Here’s what you can do with WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool:

Don’t forget to press that Settings button and fine-tune the tool to your business’ location. Do that and you’ll know exactly how effective the keywords are in your area.

Once you have your keywords, put them in these places:

• Page titles;
• Page meta descriptions;
• Page URLs;
• Image filenames;
• Image ALT texts;
• Link texts;
• H1-H4 headings;
• Anywhere you can use them naturally in your texts.

And stick to these recommendations so your keywords don’t cause your site any harm:

• Avoid optimizing one page for multiple unrelated keywords.
• Likewise, avoid optimizing multiple pages for the same keywords.
• Include your keywords in text sparingly, in a natural way. Like you would use them in a live conversation.

3. Identify local competitors and get valuable information from them

There’s no business, big or small, without competition. And if you want to overtake your competitors, first you must know who they are. Maybe you already know a few of them; SEO tools can help you find even more.

You can easily find local rival businesses with the Dangerous Competitors tool.

How do you use it?

First, open the tool and click on the Settings button.

Then follow these steps:

1. Enter your target keywords in the Keywords tab.
2. Enter your preferred search engines in the Search engines tab. Make sure to set the correct location.
3. In the Competitors tab, you can enter the URLs’ of the competitors you already know. If you don’t know any yet, the tool will find some for you soon enough – be sure to enter them here then.
4. In the Search results tab, select all the types of search results that are relevant to you.
5. In the Monthly searches tab, select your target region.
6. Press Save.

And after some scanning, Dangerous Competitors will generate a table with websites who are the most likely to be your direct local competitors. But keep in mind that no tool can think for itself, so it’s going to need a human’s judgment – your judgment to choose the correct websites. Visit them one by one, find out if they are really your competitors, and if they are – only then add their URLs in the Competitors tab in Settings. With that, WebCEO will keep monitoring their metrics for you.

What else can you do with their sites?

1. Check out their content for ideas. Topics, writing style, types of content they post, even just design appearance – you can find inspiration anywhere.
2. Find their weaknesses: what do they do worse than you? Do they have any pages that should be easy to outrank?
3. Collaborate with them. If you can participate in an online event together with a competitor (or even in just a write-up), then it’s a good boost to your online presence in terms of both exposure and expertise.
4. Use their sites for link building. This warrants its own segment, and it starts right now.

4. Find sites where you can make local backlinks

SEO is impossible without link building. You need other sites to link to yours and acknowledge it as worthy of users’ time, or you will not get anywhere.

But first, you need to find sites that could realistically give you backlinks. How?

Meet your new friend, Competitor Backlink Spy.

The idea is to find out which sites are already linking to your direct competitors. Once you do, you can start looking for ways to create your own backlinks there. If you already know who your competitors are, keep reading; if you don’t yet, feel free to go back to the previous segment.

Open the Competitor Backlink Spy tool and click on the Settings button.

In the Competitors tab, enter your rival websites’ URLs and be sure to check their boxes. Then press Save.

The tool will spend some time scanning and generate a table with everybody’s backlinks – yours and theirs. More accurately, those will be pages from other sites that link to you and them.

You want to look for the pages which link to your competitors but not to you: those are your potential backlink donors. Visit those sites and judge for yourself if they could provide you with a relevant and authoritative backlink. And once you find a site you like, it’s finally link building time!

5. Get listed on local business directories

Google can find pretty much anything, but searching becomes easier when you can narrow it down to just the kind of content you need. For example, there is YouTube for videos. And for small businesses? There are business directories.

Some of the best (and completely free!) directories include:

• Google Business Profile
• Foursquare
• Yellow Pages
• Hotfrog
• EZLocal
• eLocal
• Manta

And there are many more you could find. Especially if you do a specific Google search like “business directories for (your type of small business)”.

6. Use social media

Did you know that on average, people browse social media for 2 hours 24 minutes a day? No wonder platforms like Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter (or is it Xwitter now?) have proven to be so excellent at promoting content.

Roughly 2.5 hours should be plenty of time for your small business to appear on somebody’s radar. But for that to happen, you need to be present in social media.

What are some effective ways to run a social media page for your small business?

1. Upload a recognizable profile picture.
2. Add as much information about your business as possible: contact info, address (with embedded map), open hours, prices, photos of your location and your products etc.
3. Place a call-to-action in the first scroll.
4. Use an automatic chatbot (if the platform supports it).
5. Reply to users ASAP when they message you.
6. Follow users who follow you. They follow you because they like you, and they will like you even more if you follow them back.
7. Post diverse content: short posts, long reads, polls, photos, images, share interesting posts from other pages.
8. Be active on your competitors’ social media pages – it’s the easiest way to expose yourself to your target audience.
9. Pin important posts.

7. Provide good user experience on your site

Everybody knows this simple rule of the Internet: if a site doesn’t work well, people won’t use it. So it goes without saying your site has to work like a well-oiled machine.

How do you ensure your site works well?

• Have a good, user-friendly design. And if you can fit everything important – your business’ name, logo, links to the most vital pages and a call-to-action – in the first scroll of your homepage, then it makes a good design even better.
• Make it load quickly. A tool like WebCEO’s Speed Optimization can check your site’s current loading speed and offer advice for improving it – for example, reducing your images’ file size.
• Make it mobile-friendly. Likewise, the Mobile Optimization tool checks how well your site works on smartphones and finds where you can make improvements – such as making your site’s design responsive.
• Fix errors ASAP. Find all errors on your site (varying from broken links to server issues) with the Site Audit tool and fix them.
• Use a chatbot. Popup chats are incredibly effective at engaging visitors and turning them into customers. Of course, first you have to fill your chatbot with all the answers your visitors might need.
• Use heatmaps. Apps like CrazyEgg can generate maps showing what users do on your site: where they click, how far down they scroll etc. As you can imagine, it’s incredibly useful for finding flaws in your site’s design.
• Use call-to-actions. A well-placed CTA can turn any site into a money-making machine. Are you nudging the visitor towards placing an order or making a purchase? Don’t forget to follow it up with a shiny button.
• Use A/B testing. When you create a new page for the purpose of making money, it helps to release a few different versions of this page to see which one generates the best response from visitors.

8. Collect positive reviews

Competence. Professionalism. Top-notch service and products. There are so many good things to say about you.

Customers must know how great you are. And who can vouch for you better than customers themselves?

That’s why you should collect customer reviews. Most of the time, customers leave reviews if you simply ask them. It’s the most affordable part of small business SEO!

There’s no better way to signal to the world that you are the real deal. And there are so many places where people can leave their reviews:

• Google;
• Social media;
• Review platforms;
• Your own website;

All of them count. So make sure you are using them all.

9. Use Schema Markup to enhance your search results

Schema Markup a.k.a. structured data. What is it and how do you use it?

Long story short, if you use it on your site’s pages, then Google can add more information to your search results. You must have definitely seen snippets with extra flair and without it. Here’s a side-by-side comparison:

Without structured data, your search results look vanilla and boring. The prettier-looking ones are more likely to steal clicks from you. And that just won’t do.

Fortunately, structured data is easy to learn. Meet Schema.org, a very helpful collection of all Schemas you could possibly want. If there’s a business, no matter how big or small, there is a Schema for it. It’s only a matter of finding the one you want to use.

For example, if you run a law firm, then you will likely want to use items from the LegalService Schema:

Once you’ve identified the right Schema for your small business, what’s next? Adding it to your pages, of course. You can do it manually, or you can use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.

Select Local Businesses, enter your site page’s URL and press Start Tagging. Your page will load with the markup tool ready for work. Simply highlight the elements you’d like to appear in Google and choose the right tag for each of them.

Once you are done, click Create HTML to generate the code with all the structured data. And then you just add it manually to your page’s HTML code. That’s it!

Enjoy your new and beautiful rich snippet. Your customers certainly will.

10. Have contact information on your site

It’s a very obvious must have for any local business. After all, how are the customers supposed to find you if they don’t know where you are? This bit of info is so important that Google awards it with a minor ranking boost – or rather, doesn’t award not having it.

Make sure your site mentions every existing way to reach you:

• Phone number
• Email address
• Physical address (and you should also embed Google Maps with your location)
• Links to your social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.)
• WhatsApp, Skype and other contacts

And for good measure, put all this information in every listing you’ve made for your small business: in social media, business directories, review platforms, Google Business Profile. Make it available everywhere you’ve left a record about your business.

11. Analyze user activity and conversions with Google Analytics

There’s a crucial piece of data you cannot afford to miss: what customers do on your site.

Do you know how they use your site? Which pages they visit, which elements they interact with, how many of them click on the Buy button? Sounds pretty important, doesn’t it?

And thankfully, you can find all this information and so much more in Google Analytics. Note that you want the new GA4 version, as the older Universal Analytics version is no longer supported.

So if you haven’t already, connect your site to Google Analytics 4 and start monitoring these reports:

• Acquisition: to see how much traffic you get and where it comes from.
• Landing page: to see user activity on your most important pages.
• Engagement: to see conversions and how users interact with your site. But using this section requires setting up some events first.

You can even type the name of a metric you want like “bounce rate” into the search bar and get an instant answer. But all that is just scratching the surface; the new and updated Google Analytics is even richer with useful data than its predecessor.

So don’t be afraid to explore and experiment. You’ll know you are doing a great job when the majority of your visitors turn into customers and keep coming back.

12. Track your Google rankings

Congratulations on making it this far. You have exerted a truly titanic effort. What comes after everything you’ve done?

Monitoring the results of your labor, of course.

It takes Google some time to notice all the SEO progress you’ve made, so it won’t happen all at once. But if you want to know the exact moment you rise in rankings, then you need to monitor the situation closely. And for that job, we have SEO tools – namely, the My Site Rankings report.

The Tool Summary screen will give you a quick overview of your ranking situation…

And if you like detailed reports, then knock yourself out with the data from the other tabs. Notice the Manage columns button: that’s where you customize your ranking reports by including the data that’s relevant to your cause.

And if you want the tool to generate reports for you automatically, click on Scan Schedule and set the dates when you would like to receive reports.

If anything good or bad happens to your site rankings, you will be informed immediately. And then you will be able to act accordingly.

Start Doing SEO For Your Small Business Add your site and track your local rankings Sign Up Free

The post 12 Big Steps for Small Local Business SEO appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Bear Fruit with Influencer Marketing Step by Step

STEP #1: Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

STEP #2: Budget Approval

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

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

STEP #3: Goal Identification and Strategy Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here we’ve come to the marketing strategy development.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STEP #4: Search for Influencers

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

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

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

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

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

Learn some tips for choosing the right people:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Learn the way Influencers operate their accounts.

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

• Learn why people have come to that Influencer.

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

How to Reach Influencers?

Common methods are:

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

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

STEP #5: Strategy Approving and Scheduling

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

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

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

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

STEP #6: Payment

There are several types of payment for Influencers:

• Monetary compensation:

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

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

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

STEP #7: Results Tracking

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEO Benefits of Influencer Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The moment you integrate SEO into your repertoire of marketing strategies, you resign your business to a never-ending war for online visibility.

Surely, you’re not the only player in your niche engaged in SEO. With over 4.7 million startups sprouting each year, the search competition is bound to get more heated.

If your web pages still don’t appear on Google’s first page after years of optimization, it’s time to recalibrate your search engine positioning strategies.

What is Search Engine Positioning?

Search engine positioning (SEP) is the strategic process of optimizing web pages to achieve higher rankings in search engine results for targeted keywords.

Sound familiar?

Yes. SEO and SEP are closely related.

Search engine positioning is a subset of search engine optimization.

The only difference is that SEO focuses on optimizing the entire website using a broad range of strategies, while SEP concentrates on improving the SERP performance of targeted keywords or specific web pages.

Why Does Search Engine Positioning Matter?

Employing SEO strategies gives your site a massive boost in overall performance on search results. However, even with sitewide optimization, some web pages will perform inferiorly to other pages on a well-optimized website.

That’s where search engine positioning comes in.

Below is a further breakdown of how search engine positioning can benefit your business:

• Visibility and Traffic

According to Backlinko, the top 1-3 results on Google have a CTR of 31.73%, 24.71%, and 18.66%, respectively. This trend decreases exponentially as you go down the SERP rankings.

Better SEP means your inferior pages become competitive enough to appear at the top of SERPs for given search queries. This increases the chances of potential customers finding you, clicking your link, and driving more organic traffic to your website.

• Credibility and Trust

Ranking well on search engines is indicative of your credibility and trustworthiness.

Remember that Google uses ranking signals like backlinks, which are viewed as votes of confidence. There is also a massive correlation between the quantity and quality of backlinks to a page’s SERP ranking.

In other words, snagging Google’s top spot adds a layer of authority to your brand. Plus, people associate high rank with having reliable information and top-notch services.

• Cost-effective Marketing

SEP leverages the power of organic traffic, which is free compared to paid advertising or other marketing tactics. By optimizing your website, you can attract potential customers without constantly spending on ads.

Improve Search Engine Positioning with These 10 Tips

So, how exactly do you employ search engine positioning on your website?

Check these tips out!

1. Audit Site Regularly

Site audits are the cornerstone of any search engine positioning strategy.

This process identifies technical issues that can hinder web crawlers from discovering or indexing your pages, such as loading time, mobile optimization, or security vulnerabilities.

Site audits also uncover areas where your content might be lacking, such as keyword relevance, informational depth, or search intent mismatch. Armed with a site auditing tool, these on-page optimization opportunities are easy to spot.

WebCEO offers a comprehensive tool for analyzing your website, giving you a bird’s eye view of the necessary information to elevate your SEP. This includes SEO score, average ranking position, traffic, and technical errors, among others.

Its intelligent on-page SEO check gives you a detailed audit of any page you’re optimizing. Learn more about WebCEO’s site audit tool here.

2. Conduct Comprehensive Keyword Research and Targeting

Imagine venturing into a vast forest without a map or compass. Keyword research plays a similar role in search engine positioning.

Web pages need content to be relevant. On the other hand, content needs keywords and effective targeting to be visible.

Keyword research helps you identify the terms and phrases your audience types into search engines to find information on your products, services, or industry. By ranking for these keywords, you ensure your content directly addresses your audience’s needs.

WebCEO’s keyword research tool is a wonderful starting point for keyword research. Just key in your term to find the best high-volume, low-difficulty keywords relevant to your business.

Users can also arrange the results using each keyword metric. The tool also reveals under-the-radar keywords, which might be helpful for niche industries.

For businesses engaged in local SEO, the Get Suggestions tab shows local keyword suggestions specific to your desired country or city.

3. Write Compelling Meta Tags and Descriptions

While meta tags and descriptions have little to do with Google’s ranking algorithm, they play a significant role in a user’s clickthrough behavior.

Compelling meta titles and descriptions are likelier to get clicked than those with generic, poorly written meta tags. OptinMonster says 4 out of 10 people click on results based on the quality of meta descriptions, emphasizing the importance of well-crafted meta tags.

Here are a few tips to optimize your meta titles and descriptions:

• Include keywords: Incorporate relevant keywords that accurately represent the page’s content. This helps search engines understand the topic of your page.
• Keep it concise: Aim for a title between 50 and 60 characters long to ensure it displays properly in search results without being truncated.
• Be descriptive and compelling: Craft titles that accurately describe the page’s content while also enticing users to click through.
• Add power words: Use action-oriented language, numbers, or emotional triggers to grab attention and encourage clicks.
• Include brand name (if applicable): If your brand is well-known or if branding is essential for the page, include your brand name towards the beginning or end of the title.

4. Optimize Your Content

The adage “Content is King” holds in the realm of search engine positioning. While technical SEO is important, your content’s quality and value ultimately determine how high you rank in search results.

High-quality content heavily intertwines with user engagement. With informative, engaging, problem-solving content, you can keep visitors hooked on your page, encouraging them to return for more.

But optimized content is more than just having good prose.

It combines relevant information, search intent alignment, good keyword integration, expertise, and new insights. Only by having these qualities can your page win the race for search engine positioning.

WebCEO’s content assistant is a robust toolkit designed to elevate your content creation process and etch your page on Google’s first page. Here are three ways it can help you:

• Discover competing pages for the keyword so you can replicate their best strategies.
• Run a content analysis to unmask optimization opportunities between your content and competitors.
• Receive intelligent SEO advice to improve your content and outcompete rivals.

5. Keep Content Updated

Writing exceptional content is one thing; regularly optimizing it is another.

Since content will be living indefinitely on your site, they must add value to your business. Updating your content to remain competitive on SERPs does just that.

Because in the ever-evolving world of search engines, fresh content always reigns supreme. According to Search Engine Journal, content freshness is a ranking factor.

But giving content a refresh is more than just changing the publication date or updating the meta title. John Mu says doing just that disrespects your users and content.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Plus, regularly updating content safeguards them from getting removed from Google’s index. Web crawlers scour the web regularly and the search engine may de-index stale content no longer relevant in today’s business landscape.

Here are smart ways to keep content fresh:

• Regularly update evergreen content: Identify evergreen pages on your website that remain relevant over time. Update these articles with new information, statistics, or examples to keep them current.
• Update outdated information: Review your existing content to ensure all information is accurate and up-to-date. Update statistics, facts, and figures as needed.
• Refresh visual content: Revamp old images, graphics, and other visual elements to keep them fresh and engaging. This could involve creating new visuals or replacing outdated ones.
• Optimize for new keywords: Conduct keyword research regularly to identify new opportunities for optimizing your content. Update existing content to incorporate relevant keywords and breathe life into its search visibility.
• Add links to related content: Update the page by adding internal links to related articles, blog posts, or resources on your website. This encourages visitors to explore more of your content and can improve the site’s internal linking structure.
• Respond to user feedback: If comments are enabled, monitor them regularly and respond promptly. Aside from keeping the page active, addressing comments also improves user satisfaction and retention.
• Analyze competitor content: Track their SEO metrics to find content that performs well, then read it carefully to get new ideas that you could use yourself.

6. Engage in Link-building

Link building, the process of acquiring links from other websites to your own, is a powerful strategy for boosting your SEP.

As mentioned above, backlinks are like votes of confidence. When reputable websites link to your target page, it essentially tells search engines, “This website is a valuable resource.” Backlinks also transfer PageRank or link juice, resulting in a boost in SERP performance.

Moreover, like all hyperlinks, backlinks are conduits for valuable referral traffic. The more high-quality backlinks, the more avenues there are for brand discovery.

While the impact of backlinks is undeniable, not all backlinks are the same.

Studies show that some backlinks decay faster than others depending on their follow attribute and the linking site’s authority. This emphasizes the importance of a backlink analysis tool to manage and maintain your page’s healthy backlink profile consciously.

WebCEO’s backlink checker showcases all the necessary metrics on backlinks, like anchor text, trust flow, citation flow, etc. The tool also lets you see your backlink profile at a glance and informs you of any changes to your backlinks.

7. Build Internal Links

Backlinks are only a single facet of the link-building process. Aside from building links from external sources back to your target pages, it’s equally crucial to establish connections between each relevant page.

This is called internal linking.

Internal links go beyond boosting search engine positioning. They create a well-organized website structure that benefits even your SEO efforts.

By building internal links, users can easily navigate between relevant pages and find the information they seek efficiently. This boosts dwell time and on-site CTR, which are SEO signals.

Internal links, like backlinks, also pass PageRank from the source to the target page. Linking high-authority, high-performing pages to lower-authority ones helps improve the ranking of those less prominent pages.

WebCEO’s internal linking tool is helpful in analyzing the performance of your internal links. Users can use this tool to see their anchor text usage, analyze page authority, and even assess how much PageRank transfers from the source to the linked page.

Remember to check the tool’s “Pages Not Linking” tab. Clicking on this option reveals viable opportunities for internal linking.

8. Establish Topical Authority

Concerning the previous tip, internal linking is not only a means for referral traffic and equity transfer. Targeted internal linking can also establish topical authority, which is crucial for improving search engine positioning.

You can achieve this using the topical cluster strategy. This is a content organization method to improve the ranking of web pages for a particular subject area.

Topical clusters are composed of two major elements:

• Pillar post: A comprehensive, long-form content that covers a broad topic in detail.
• Cluster content: Subtopic pages that branch out from that pillar page.

The pillar post becomes the central hub page, surrounded by pieces of cluster content connected using internal links.

In the end, this is how it should look like:

A topical cluster setup increases your site’s topical authority. By extension, each web page under those topical clusters gets a boost in SERP performance, thus benefiting your search engine positioning.

9. Speed Up Your Site

In today’s fast-paced digital world, website speed is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity.

Page loading time is a ranking factor for both mobile and desktop searches. With Google’s focus on positive user experience, a slow web page goes against the grain.

Slow-loading pages only frustrate users, leading to high bounce rates and reduced dwell time. Conversely, a speedy site leaves a positive user experience, keeping visitors engaged and increasing conversion rates. After all, users are likelier to complete desired actions on a website that performs well.

WebCEO’s site audit tool includes a page speed test to ensure your pages give users the best possible experience. The tool also provides actionable instructions on how to fix speed-related issues it encounters on your website.

10. Optimize for SERP Features

Optimizing content for a favorable SERP ranking is good.

But landing Google’s position #1 for a given query is not the end-all, be-all of your SEP approach.

Search engine results pages are becoming increasingly sophisticated and feature-rich. They now offer users various ways to find the information they need.

Optimizing your website content for these SERP features can significantly benefit your search engine positioning strategy.

For instance, featured snippets, knowledge panels, or image packs occupy prime real estate at the top of SERPs. You gain significant visibility by optimizing your content to appear in these features. This lets you grab user attention and drive organic traffic to your website, even if you don’t hold the number one ranking.

As for local businesses, optimizing your Google Business Profile listing puts you on top of local searches. Customers from your locality are more likely to find locally operating companies that are optimized for local SEO.

Afterword

If you do SEO for your site, then you’ve already made some progress in search engine positioning. All it needs is some extra emphasis on content optimization.

If you’re aiming to get your pages to the top spot on Google SERPs, you need all the help you can get. Use online SEO tools to elevate your search engine positioning.

Check this complete breakdown of WebCEO’s online SEO tools for more information.

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The post 10 Tips to Boost Search Engine Positioning in 2024 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.

Give Life to Your Old Posts Sign Up Free

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

It’s that time of the year again. Saint Valentine’s Day is coming! With all sorts of drama breaking out, it has its own special meaning for everyone. And digital marketers, with their not-so-romantic but still noble motives, are no exception.

In this modern age, most shopping is done online, and Valentine’s Day tends to drive people to buy something nice for someone else. It wouldn’t be half as fun otherwise. But online shopping overtaking offline means that digital marketers can’t afford to relax. When a wave of customers is coming after products like yours, it’s time to bring out the tools, turn your brain on and give your website’s SEO some tuning before it’s too late!

So, if you run an online store, what steps can you take to catch this wave and earn more traffic?

Choose Keywords for the Occasion

If you are an experienced SEO (and a WebCEO user as well), you already know how to run keyword research, what tools you need and what kind of keywords will give you an edge. If you forgot, let me refresh your memory: long-tail keywords. Long, specific phrases describing the things that the users want to find online. The closer your keywords match those phrases, the better. Be sure to add copious local description if you’re local only Don’t feel shy to use WebCEO’s Keyword Research tool if you need help.

A marketing lifehack: not only couples shop on the Valentine’s Day. Single people do it too, so you might consider expanding your range of keywords to include them, as well. In other words, research your target audience before researching your keywords.

Correct Timing Is Key

Question: when do the majority of people stop looking for Valentine’s Day presents? Is “the day after” your answer? Good, you are someone who knows their stuff. The same is true for every other holiday: as soon as it becomes yesterday’s news, the stampede of buyers reduces dramatically, and you’ll be lucky if there are any who visit your site. You’ve let the opportunity slip by!

That’s why smart marketers launch their campaign early, when the interest in the trend only starts to build up. Take a look at this graph made in Google Trends. You can see how the number of searches made last year drops like a rock on February 15th, and the tide you want to ride is clearly visible.

Mobile Optimization Is More Important Than Ever

It is an established fact that the majority of Internet users nowadays prefer mobile devices over alternatives like PCs. From that, we can infer that online purchases are primarily made from mobile devices, too. If we add to our line of logic Google’s policy to index websites’ mobile versions before their desktop counterparts, it will bring us to a simple conclusion: if you want to attract a large audience to your site, optimization for mobile devices is an absolute must. Elementary!

Responsive design is a must, and it doesn’t matter what niche you perform in. People prefer mobile, so don’t disappoint them on such a beautiful day. Check out the WebCEO Landing Page SEO Tool to see if you are ready to welcome mobile customers.

Use Images and Videos To Show Your Products

This one’s a no-brainer. How will anyone buy from you if they don’t even know what your products look like? But more importantly, here’s an interesting fact about your potential customers: most of them aren’t even sure at first what they want to buy. That’s why gift guides with lots of options in them are so popular, especially when they are in a video format (YouTube is the number one go-to site for online shoppers). So blow the dust off your camera and start shooting.

Don’t forget about optimization:

• put keywords into filenames and alt tags
• compress images and videos to make them load faster
• pick the right dimensions for images

All to provide users with a better experience on your website.

Create Appropriately-Themed Landing Pages

Self-explanatory: visitors will enjoy a good-looking page with hearts, cupids or whatever is best suited for the event. This step works best when such pages have already been on your site for years. A URL’s age and its inbound links are advantages not to be discarded, after all. Directing traffic to a freshly made page before time runs out is a tough challenge, so it’s better to re-use your old assets whenever possible. Note that renaming a URL counts as creating a new one! If you absolutely have to update it (for example, change /valentines-2019/ to /valentines-2020/), that’s what the 301 redirects are for.

Once the big day is over and the page has fulfilled its purpose, it would be a good idea to strip it off its content, replace it with something related to the holiday (in this case, St. Valentine-themed) so that it wouldn’t be blank, and let the little hard worker rest until the next year. Unless you don’t mind orders for Valentine’s gifts in the middle of summer.

Social Media Is Your Friend

As always, blogs and social networks are allies to anyone who has a business to promote. Especially on holidays and other important days. This is where you stir your grey matter up with chocolate and other unhealthy glucose-containing food and start producing content that will leave the audience in awe! On the precipice of Saint Valentine’s Day, the world’s most ancient and powerful muse known as Love is twice as generous to those who ask her for inspiration.

Prepare your social media marketing campaign and check out how many people it has brought to your website with the help of the WebCEO Social Engagement Tool.  

Say “Yes” to Collaborations 

I’m sorry to say this but you might not sell that particular product a person would like to buy for a present. You may sell flowers but a customer would also like to buy some chocolate which you don’t have. And – wow! – chocolate is available in a store you’re partnered with! Five points from you and ten points to your competitor for a perfect Valentine’s combo. 

Collaborations with other businesses can always bring you extra free advertising and income. You can advertise a business or businesses you want to create a combo with on your website, and your partners will do the same. Add special discounts and you score! People like to buy things advantageously. 

You will not only be seen by a wider audience but also get found for more queries. This will also bring more brand mentions and backlinks. 

Your prime mission is to find a first match for your product that people tend to want alongside your product. Begin working with someone who sells that product. This works for seasonal offers as well, of course.
As soon as you have started a collaboration, don’t forget to track your results!

Use the WebCEO Web Buzz Monitoring Tool to see who mentioned your business on social media, news and blogs and analyze what people think of your business. 

The WebCEO Backlink Profile Tools will show all of your gained backlinks and will analyze them for toxicity!

Can Your Server Handle Incoming Traffic?

As this magical day has plenty in store for everyone who’s willing to participate in its celebration, there’s one surprise you might receive from Saint Valentine… a server crash.

Yeah. This can happen when the crowd you’ve attracted is just too big. Unfortunately, “too much traffic” is also a thing. Imagine yourself as the winner, outmatching the competitors, swimming in orders and living your dream, only to lose it all to a server error. The embarrassment!

That’s why it won’t hurt to ensure your server is disaster-ready. Naturally, the sooner you look into everything that could cause problems and take measures, the better your site’s chances to pull through the holiday.

Upgrade Your Customer Experience

“Dude, where did you buy such a cool present for Bethany?”

“Oh yeah, I know one stunning place…”

All companies dream of having great word of mouth. You in turn should stop dreaming and start creating that stunning reality.

During the holidays all of us are nervous because there are a lot of things to complete. St. Valentine’s Day is the toughest one as we literally have to put our hearts, souls and feelings into presents for our dearest one (or more). If you place even more problems on your customers’ shoulders, they may shrug you off in a hurry.

Create an easy and fast method of searching your site so users can find and buy a desired gift, and your karma will be clean. Don’t create way too many forms to fill for ordering some chocolate. You will damage the user experience. A person may escape your grasp just before they would have otherwise purchased and buy from another website. The faster a client figures out how to order, and the easier he or she gets a confirmation of purchasing, the happier a customer is, the more adorable you are for him or her.

Who knows, they may even fall in love with you and your website!

A great bonus about happy customers is that they aren’t shy to express their appreciation out loud. People’s words are the best advertisement and you can’t lose this chance. Satisfy your customers with the best experience of purchasing a present on your website and you’ll get effective and free advertising.

Start Loving Internal Links

Internal links are more helpful than we think and will bring you more than you may expect.

Let’s set up a picture: you have a nice landing page with cool things to order for the occasion, people like it and order your goods. It’s the perfect time to give them a clue about what they can have in addition to the main dish! If you promote chocolate – give a link to the gourmet peanut butter that tastes perfect with that very dessert and is available on your website. By helping customers pick a perfect Valentine’s Day combination, you will increase traffic to more than just one product page of your website.

Moreover, using this method, you may let people know that you can help them on any occasion, not only on Valentine’s Day. Place links – where it is appropriate of course – to other special offers that touch different holidays like Christmas, New Year’s, etc. Satisfied customers will definitely bookmark them. However, that’s only possible if you have permanent pages for such events.

Use the WebCEO Internal Links Tool to analyze and optimize your internal links.

There’s No Such Thing as “Shopping is Done”

Make people buy more even if they don’t need it.

Predict their desires and plans for this day and provide them with the stuff that is not only about presents. Help your customers organize a real and unforgettable celebration by giving them an opportunity to buy something like a “Special Evening Pack” that will contain everything needed for a private celebration: wine, candles, flowers, and so on.

How this can help your SEO? Good question. I’m sure your marketing department will be able to create something special without our help. However, our tip is about your keyword field extension.

You can use questions like “What to do on Valentine’s Day?” – 9900 monthly searches – as a title for a special offer and sell anything. Just present this “anything” decently so that people would be ready to use their credit cards.

Local Businesses Should Take This Chance

Delivery of holiday meals, candles, decorations or presents will help you get more clients during a period of celebration. Cafes can upgrade or change their menu and launch a special delivery service dedicated to St Valentine’s Day. Enrich your keyword sets with “delivery” focused keywords. 

Our special advice: make your delivery work ahead of the events. People tend to plan their “banquets” beforehand. Thus, it will be great if you present a new menu and start taking orders for delivery two or three weeks before the very day. You will escape mess and turmoil. Workers will know what to do and how to act in advance. 

During the pre-celebration period you can spread information about your special delivery on social media, your website and via newsletters where your announcement will be easily noticed. Make this offer not only special but comfortable. Add the possibility to make orders via social media and messaging apps besides phone calls.

We repeat: Do not overlook taking orders via messaging apps!

To see the results of your special offer’s social media campaign, use the WebCEO Facebook Insights Tool and Social Engagement Tool.

The WebCEO Google Analytics Module will show you how many people have come to your website and from where. The new audience can be analyzed by location, language and device. 

And that’s it for today. Work hard and work well with your SEO, but spare some time for those important to you, as well. Happy Valentine’s Day to you! Start with the keywords!

The post 12 SEO Tips for Online Marketers to Prepare for Valentine’s Day appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

The Internet has become a necessity for today’s evolving businesses. There are over 4.2 billion active Internet users around the world, with 3.4 billion of them using social media. Attracting the attention of potential customers in this crowded marketplace is a challenge. And the best tool for facing the challenge is search engine optimization (SEO).

Why SEO, out of all the marketing approaches available on the Internet? A proper SEO strategy helps businesses maintain a robust and user-friendly website that ranks highly on search engine results pages. For instance, adding a call-to-action (CTA) on every blog post may lead some readers to one of your product pages, thus increasing conversion rates. However, SEO depends on Google algorithms that are continually being updated. Strategies that may have won you the top-page result last year may not work today.

Each Google algorithm update is geared towards providing user-focused and user-friendly results and maximizing user experience (UX). UX fits into SEO since both of them share a common goal. They help marketers by providing them with relevant and useful information. SEO leads people to your content, while UX answers their queries.

If you’re a business owner, digital marketer, or blogger, it’s important to stay in sync with present changes. Use modern SEO practices to make sure you optimize your website for the needs of both search engines and users.

In this article, we will explore the most effective SEO strategies for marketers, as well as SEO tools for improving rankings and increasing website traffic, which will boost your business’s conversion ratios.

1. Create a responsive, mobile-friendly website

In 2015, Google confirmed that mobile friendliness is a ranking factor in its algorithms. People use mobile phones to search on Google, find local stores, and shop online. 52.2% of 2018’s website traffic was generated through mobile devices. Due to this change in consumer habits, mobile friendliness has become the norm for SEO.

Some businesses choose to have separate versions for mobile users. However, responsive design has become the norm in website design. Responsive design adapts website display based on the resolution and type of device used by the visitor. This allows it to look great at any size, from a 14-inch LCD monitor to 4.7-inch mobile phone. A responsive website ensures a better experience for your visitors.

2. Produce High-Quality, Relevant Content

Content remains king in the SEO realm, but the emphasis has shifted towards producing high-quality, relevant content that serves the needs of your target audience. Google’s algorithms have become increasingly sophisticated in recognizing content quality, relevance, and user intent.

Start by researching keywords to identify the topics and phrases your audience is searching for. Then, create comprehensive and informative content that addresses their questions and provides valuable insights.

Aim to become an authority in your niche by producing in-depth guides, blog posts, videos, and other content formats that showcase your expertise.

Optimize your content for featured snippets, voice search, and mobile devices. Structured data markup can also help search engines understand your content better, potentially leading to enhanced visibility in search results.

3. Optimize your business for local SEO

Local SEO is crucial for brick-and-mortar business and local services. It helps companies promote their goods and services to potential clients in their neighbourhood. Search engines gather information for local search, relying on local content, social media pages, web links, and citations to deliver relevant results to local consumers. Even if you’re not selling products or services online, being found on local searches is still vital to bringing customers to your door. Customers need to see your contact information, direction, and opening hours.

Establishing relevance on Google lets your business get found among local searches. Have a team of SEO professionals to provide a clear view of what SEO campaign suits your business. Local SEO providers focus on local consumer behaviour and have the right knowledge of how the local industry works.

Another advantage of local SEO is that the size of your business does not matter. You can be on top of your competition if you have great online reviews and an appealing business listing. Reaching local customers lets you cater to people who are already searching for a shop nearby.

4. Implement Secure HTTPS Encryption

Website security is not only crucial for user trust but also for SEO. Google prefers secure websites that use HTTPS encryption over non-secure HTTP sites. To secure your website, obtain an SSL/TLS certificate and configure your server to use HTTPS.

Once your website is HTTPS-secured, update internal and external links to reflect the secure URL. This includes updating canonical tags, sitemaps, and any social media profiles or directories that link to your site.

Google Chrome and other browsers may display warnings to users on non-secure sites, potentially driving visitors away, so securing your website is essential.

5. Boost SEO using schema

Using structured data, also known as schema, is a fantastic way to boost your online presence. A schema is code that is used on your website to help search engines like Google gather information based on your page content. Google has hinted that schema has the potential to become a ranking factor. Since then, modern SEO companies have considered schema as a fundamental factor in a website’s visibility.

Schema helps boost your search engine performance by displaying your website’s content in great detail. It acts as a diagram which helps search engines understand your page content by instructing search engine bots on how to interpret your web content and show it to search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines read the code and use it to create “rich snippets.” They are eye-catching and instantly inform the reader about what it is just by looking. Rich snippets are content marked with schema that shows thumbnail images and reviews, for instance why other people liked a restaurant and why their food tastes great.

Here’s an example of what you can enjoy if you use schema.

6. Make use of link building

“Links in particular are really important to Google because that’s how we discover the rest of your website.” – John Mueller, Google

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from another website to your domain (hyperlinks are embedded links used to help people to navigate from one site to another). They help search engines like Google to crawl between the pages on your site. This can be a valuable asset for modern web-based businesses. If you have not yet implemented this strategy, you may be missing out on potential business growth.

There are various ways to build links, and learning even one can lift you above the competition. Andrey Lipattsev of Google conducted a survey which showed that one of the most critical ranking signals for a website during searches is link building. However, not all links are “good” links. Low-quality links are “spammy” (e.g. irrelevant links in blog comments, paid links) and may risk your website ranking being penalized. One of the safest and effective ways to build links is through outreach and influencer marketing.

Strategies to get other websites linking to you:

• Put your goods and/or services where influential people can see them. For example, promote a giveaway or contest of your product on Instagram.
• Get links from family, friends, and people you know online. Remember, your biggest supporters are often family and friends.
• Create informative content that people will want to link and make it as their reference.
• Submit blogs for press releases and your website to local listings and directories.

7. Master Page Experience Report in Google Search Console

Google has strongly emphasized page experience and Core Web Vitals as ranking factors. It looks at whether your website is speedy, friendly on mobile phones, a secure place for visitors, and easy to navigate.

The Page Experience Report helps you find and fix anything that might annoy your visitors. With this report, you can make your website the go-to place for people looking for what you offer, just like creating a welcoming and comfortable space for friends to hang out!

In our previous article, we provided you with all the current data regarding the Page Experience Report in Google Search Console. The most significant change is the replacement of First Input Delay (FID) with Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a part of Core Web Vitals by March 2024. Visit Google Search Console, be aware of these upcoming changes, and prepare for them. Monitoring your site’s performance through tools like Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights will help you identify areas that need improvement.

8. Invest in Video SEO

Video content continues to gain popularity online, and search engines increasingly incorporate video results into search listings. Invest in video SEO for your content to capitalize on this trend if you have the ability and resources.

Optimize video titles, descriptions, and tags with relevant keywords. Use high-quality thumbnails and create engaging, informative video content that resonates with your audience. Hosting videos on platforms like YouTube and embedding them on your website can help improve visibility in both traditional and video search results.

Remember to monitor video performance through analytics, track viewer engagement, and encourage social sharing to expand your video’s reach.

Social sharing of your videos should occur across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Social sharing expands your video’s reach and signals to search engines that your content is valuable and relevant to a broader audience.

9. Use SEO tools

To stand above your online competitors, you need to have the right SEO knowledge. Essential SEO tools enable you to track your SEO performance, save time, and explore new possibilities. You can quickly check your website’s ranking position, traffic level, incoming links, social media results, and other metrics that play a significant role in your strategy. WebCEO has created 21 SEO tools that can help you achieve a high ranking on the SERPs. Small to medium-sized enterprises can efficiently monitor their metrics using these tools.

Here’s a quick list of SEO tools that are necessary for modern businesses.

Keyword Analysis Tool

You’ll have no need to switch between several keyword tools for great keyword ideas. Find thousands of keyword suggestions with the WebCEO’s Keyword Research tool.

Apart from the great keyword suggestions regularly found in the Google Keyword Planner, you’ll also get popular keyword phrases from the Google search bar autocomplete, the People also ask widget, and other sources.

• WebCEO Keyword Research

Rank Tracking Tool

Check rankings across traditional organic results, SERP features (Knowledge Panel, videos, images, maps, hotels, People also ask, and more), as well as paid results (ads, Places, shopping and hotels). Always know if a specific landing page is outranked by another page of your site.

WebCEO tracks all these types of results and shows special icons for each type of rank result in your SEO ranking report.

• WebCEO Rank Tracking

Link Analysis Tool

Get a full list of domains linking to your website with the Linking Domains report. Inspect whether the linking domains are diverse enough, take into account monthly organic traffic to the linking domain. Prove your website’s authority and make your backlink profile powerful using the WebCEO Backlink Checker.

Remember! It’s better to get a link from 100 domains each than 100 links from one domain.

• WebCEO Backlink Checker Tool

Afterword

There is so much work to do to maintain website optimization. Google changes its algorithm daily to provide users with better experience. Organic linking is effective if paired with high-quality content. The more organic links you get from trusted websites, the more search engines will consider your site as trustworthy too. For this reason, SEO tools plus a professional SEO agency can save you more time, effort, and money. This makes working less of a hassle and more productive.

Remember to focus first on making solid content and make an effort to understand basic SEO. With the frequent Google algorithm changes, heading into 2019 is a great time to reevaluate your strategies. As a marketer and a business owner, it’s vital to adapt to a changing marketplace. By hiring a local SEO provider, you are choosing to focus your valuable energies on tasks that matter the most and allowing their expertise to work for you.

The post 9 Modern SEO Practices for Money-Making Marketers appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

A large number of the websites we visit have a blog section. Why do people start blogging and what benefits does this bring to their websites? According to statistics, websites with a blog section receive 97% more backlinks and have 55% more visitors. Moreover, blogs increase a website’s traffic by up to 6 times. These are good enough results so far to confirm that blogging is worth some extra attention.

Why do people prefer reading blog posts, although there are already a lot of articles on the same topics? Why do blogs stand out among other types of content?

The answer is – as usually – pretty simple: it’s in the presentation.

Let’s compare an ordinary manual:

with a blog post:

The difference is significant: while the first one is long and boring and without headers and bullet points, a dull situation which Google Panda doesn’t like, the second is rather short, interesting, and – what really matters – hits the nail on the head, especially if it was written by a practicing expert in a sphere you want to read about.

Blogging is all about success. However, this success consists of more than just words typed in a word processor. You can’t call your content “King” if you haven’t optimized it from top to bottom.

STAGE #1: Preparations

The stage of preparations means: niche and topic determining, title drafting, and target audience identifying:

1. It is important to choose a topic you want to write about and to be sure in your capability to enlighten your visitors. Also, depending on your niche and topic, you will possibly have to maintain an accepted style of writing.

2. Don’t start writing without a title. Try to keep a draft of your upcoming article in mind. This will help you even with keyword usage during the text writing. One title always means a bunch of derived variants, which may sound better, more successful, or brighter, and can give you more ideas about what to cover in your article.

For instance, let’s imagine that you want to name your article “Coca-Cola sounds good for evening relaxation”: here we can write about Coke itself, what type of evenings it suits the most, and why. Some derived variants: “Coca-Cola sounds good for an evening with friends/for a date” and “Coca-Cola is the best choice for a party at home”. Now you can also mention where you can go with friends/girlfriend of boyfriend, and describe specific kinds of activities outside and inside, extending the title’s background. This way you will consider new ideas each time you “touch” the title in your mind or look at it on a Word document page.

3. The target audience may be people of a specific age, gender, nationality, location, occupation, and lifestyle, who already visit your website and those who may be your visitors in the future.

Since these people would be interested in the niche or topic you are going to disclose, you should know more about them. People from different locations may consider the information you are going to present as something to be taken personally, because of their cultural, mental, or religious background. And if you want to study some specific controversial cases, you are better to know who will be for and against your research conclusions and assumptions.

Also, you should know who your current audience is even if you now want to attract an absolutely different group of people. First, you will try to always keep your current readers by your side. Second, an analysis of your ongoing situation will provide you with necessary data for defining people’s needs. Third, information you gather will be your most reliable weapon. You will know what to write, how to write, where to promote your content, and how to present it.

You can get demographic and physiographic data in Google Analytics.

STAGE #2: Keyword Research

Keyword research is key to your content optimization, one of the most important steps a webmaster should take before presenting content. Depending on the niche and topic you’ve chosen, several points have to be taken into account:

• Long tail keywords are more specific than short ones and focused more on the sphere you are writing about. Try to use them more in order to take your place in a narrow circle of a chosen niche. Moreover, while searching for long tail keywords, you will also supply yourself with more interesting information to mention in your blog post. For example, WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool not only shows you the statistics concerning a keyword’s value, but also presents some variants of queries which are popular among searchers, which can open you up to a topic you haven’t yet read about;

• Look for synonymic keyword phrases – don’t use only one long tail keyword throughout the whole blog post, but instead examine those combinations that are equally successful and will be appropriate in your text. This is rather important because blog posts are longer than several paragraphs and you can’t use one variant again and again. Google will see this as keyword stuffing. Besides, it is always enjoyable to read multifaceted content;
• Keyword research should be all-sided, i.e. check everything, not just one tool, in order to determine which keywords you really need for your blog post.

1. First, you are better to analyze Google results. Google is also able to give you some advice concerning keyword selection. Apart from paid and organic search results it also shows what people seek for in terms of your niche. You can check this in the boxes “People also ask” and “Searches related to…”:

2. Don’t forget to learn about your competitors’ performance backwards and forwards. This refers to everything: keywords they used (which you can also check with WebCEO’s Spy on Competitors Report – it gives you full data regarding your competitors’ keywords which are relevant to your content), topics they covered which are related to yours, posts’ peculiarities in terms of style of writing, material used, and points described, and how popular they are among readers.

To Identify your competitors, you can use two ways:

• Google search, which will show you your top competitors in organic search results:

• WebCEO’s Competitor Metrics Tool will find and sort your competitors by their rankings and other parameters.

STAGE #3: How to Write a Blog Post

Once you have found your keywords and pried for competitors’ secrets, it is easier to start writing. Remember that the answer for a question “how to write a good article and bring traffic?” will always be: provide content of the highest quality. First, Google rewards quality a lot. Second, keywords bring searchers to your website, but the way you present and disclose your idea are key factors for searchers to stay on your website longer and eventually become your users.

Consider the following points during the process of creating your blog post:

• Style

At this point you should be careful.

If your blog post is all about your personal opinion and entertaining others, you can allow yourself a lot of things, which will make your article more interesting. Joke a lot, present the information in the simplest way possible, ask some questions and answer them right away in order to raise any given reader’s curiosity and not to leave them without an explanation. Readers like clarity; with it they will come back again and again.

However, if you are writing for serious research purposes, the above method may not be for you. While it may be really great if you simplify difficult information for readers in order to keep them by your side, don’t go way too far with this. Some niches (especially of a scientific character) are built on terms, definitions, case studies, and so on, that is why our advice is to use those extremely difficult words for a seriously researched article: ordinary people can’t understand them, but at the same time those are keywords for people who are deeply into the topic.

Be simple but at the same time don’t miss a thing.

• Structure

Don’t be cruel in your attitude toward your readers and forget, please, about using plain text with enormous paragraphs, like this:

Source: https://plain-text.co/

If you do this, users will return to the SERP and look for other links, rather than think “yes, that’s definitely what I wanted to read”. To avoid such situations, it will be better to use:

1. Headings;

2. Subheadings – by dividing your topic and outlining the sense of an abstract in a subheading, you help users to navigate;

3. Bullet and numbered lists – these are extremely helpful if you want to bring somebody’s attention to specific points;

4. Small paragraphs – five or six reasonably short sentences will serve you best. Don’t overwhelm readers’ minds;

5. Bold or italic words – a reader perceives information presented in bold as being very important.

A piece of useful advice: put keywords in your heading and subheadings. This will give you more of a chance to be found on the Internet.

• First Paragraph

The first paragraph is essential. By looking at it and reading it, a visitor decides whether to stay on your website or that it is better to go. Your mission is to catch people’s attention in the first sentences. One method to do this is to use questions. By asking various questions, you will make a reader understand what problems concern you and what you are going to talk about in the next couple of paragraphs or pages.

Try to make a question that will be noticeable and intriguing, if it’s possible.

You can also use statistics in answers for these questions. As people tend to believe different authoritative sources and figures, you will get more chances to reassure them of your credibility.

Remember to use keywords in the first paragraph. When we see hints of the information we were looking for, readers will usually decide immediately that they made the right choice in clicking on a specific result (and not bounce).

• Visual Media

Don’t be boring. All those subheadings and bullet lists are well and fine, but people don’t want to see only text. Words, words, and words make us tired and sleepy. So, make the topic you are going to talk about even more interesting than it is, if it is. Videos, images, screenshots, audio files, PDF files, and infographics will rarely be unwelcome. With these forms of content, you will make the reading process more enjoyable and your reputation as an author brighter.

Even if you are writing about a scientific topic, you can add an interview with an expert from your field, as well as some tables, diagrams, or schemes which present relevant statistics or important data.

If you use images, make sure they are optimized. Add keywords to the image titles and alt text in order to get your article to be shown in Google’s vertical search results.

• Length

Blog articles are not academic research works where the word count and overall size are on a big scale. The best length for blog posts is approximately 1200-1600 words. This is neither long nor short but enough to briefly cover a topic. Readers don’t like overly long posts even if they are extremely interesting, because they don’t want to waste a lot of time and prefer to quickly learn new information.

• Links

Whether you are writing something scientific or entertaining you can’t avoid links. They are much more important for your blog post than you may think of them. Try to use authoritative and respectful websites for your research and then link to them. People are unlikely to believe your words for sure if they don’t know your sources well enough. This is also beneficial for you, because this way you won’t be seen by Google as filling your website with suspicious links which may cause harm.

If you already have relevant topic articles written on your website, you can:

1. put them in your text in the form of anchor links to pay readers’ attention to the old posts, and
2. create a list of all links which lead to relevant articles you’ve written. This will be very useful and comfortable for a reader and this will bring more traffic to other posts.

• Reference List

If your article encompasses deep and comprehensive research, you for sure will use or have used a lot of data taken from outside authoritative websites, and even printed materials. Classify the sources and create a reference list at the end of your article.

Why do you need this?

First, Google is watching you and it likes to see good links on your website. Second, if your material can be used for research papers, students will be grateful and will visit again. Third, by making this list you can attract the attention of those websites’ owners whose websites you have taken the information from. If you’ve said something intriguing to them, they may decide to link to you in one of their newer articles.

People are sometimes curious about where an author gets the information presented in a post. They want to know whether to believe the stated information or not, and it doesn’t matter if it is scientific or casual. You will do users a favor and reassure them in the quality of your material if you deploy at least a tiny reference list.

• Conclusions

Your conclusion should be short. You have already discussed everything in your article earlier, so don’t try to retell each piece of information. If you asked some important questions throughout the article, it would be appropriate to provide simple and brief answers for them as a little summary.

• Questions at the End

If you have an audience that has known you for some time and is interested in your content, you can try to talk with them. A simple question at the end of your article about a potential topic your visitors would like to read about next time will provoke a conversation in the comments section. This will raise engagement with your website and attract more attention to your further articles. You can even organize a poll or survey in order to learn what your readers are interested in.

STAGE #4: Formatting and Posting

Table of contents

If your blog post is rather long and it will be difficult and uncomfortable to scroll down for five minutes in order to find a desired part of the article, you can create a table of contents before the text and make anchors like Wikipedia does. This will help users to navigate and to see from the very beginning which points you are going to discuss throughout the post.

Proofreading

This step is critical. Even if you are good enough with grammar and punctuation, before posting you should give your draft to an experienced proofreader. There are two reasons for this:

1. You saw your text a lot of times while you were writing it. You already know each detail and word, and your eyes are so tired, they can’t see what is right and what is not. A proofreader sees almost all your mistakes;
2. A fresh look at your article may give you more ideas and you can then edit your text so it will be better and easier to read.

Hero image

A hero image will be a great beginning for your blog post, especially if you choose a catchy header for it so it will attract a lot of your reader attention. Make it simple, but gorgeous and bright, so people will be pleased to push a “Continue Reading” button and be ready to share your post on social media. Bright colors always “catch” our attention and raise interest, so don’t miss the opportunity to use them.

However, be careful if you take a picture from the Internet, because the punishment for an author’s rights violation can be severe.

SERP view

Snippets at Position 0 receive a huge amount of traffic. Besides properly writing your Schema and Open Graph code, your title tag, meta description, URL – everything should fit your niche and topic AND contain keywords related to it! If you don’t take care of what your Featured Snippets and Knowledge Panels would look like, the odds of being chosen for such wonderful results will go down and any text shown in a Snippet will be random, causing searchers not to visit your website.

We will never be tired of repeating in each paragraph that keywords are essential for your content if you want it to be visible for searchers.

Email notifications

If your users agreed to receive emails from you when they were signing up, you should use this opportunity! Send them notifications about your most important new blog posts with a short review which may push people to read them. Make a little summary for points disclosed and describe the benefits a user can receive after reading.

But never send tons of email notifications, such as more than once per month, because this could be perceived as spam!

May be interesting for…

A little graph you may add to your post could be about whom a new post will be interesting for. This is useful if the title is not specific and the audience of your website is diverse. For example, students, SEO specialists, artists, software engineers, and a long list of professions and kinds of activity. To be more specific, you can write down variants like: “people who are interested in SEO”, “SEO beginners”, and so on.

Why this may be important: You can get clearer analytic data.

When readers see that a certain post is for people of another sphere of interest or kind of activity, they won’t click on it and wait for the next one. You may think that this is sad, because not all readers will check a new post. However, think about it from another point of view. When people visit a page and understand that a post is not for them, they leave immediately. As a result, the bounce rate will be high.

When the desired target audience visits a page with a new post you can learn about them more deeply and identify which topics are really in great demand on your website.

CTAs

The CTA (Call to Action) is your offer. You should not just ask a person to subscribe, but making a proposal he or she can’t refuse. Show what people will get if they decide to follow you; useful pieces of advice, tips & tricks, bonuses, presents, and so on. There is a good possibility readers won’t follow after reading words like “Subscribe to get the latest news.” There are a lot of news sources.

People will prefer to know what extra benefits they will get.

STAGE #5: Blog Post Promotion

Social Media

If you run a website, that’s a great reason for starting your social life! People chill out in social media most of their time so why not be there. If you really work hard on your platforms you will receive great opportunities. People like, share, and comment on content that they like and consider credible.

Create a catchy, bright picture, which fits the article you want to promote, and write a short (one or two sentences) description under it with a link to the blog post. People who are already interested in your content will like it and share. If they leave a comment with questions – answer them, if they praise you – thank them. Be grateful and you will receive a lot.

However, remember that your account should also be dedicated to your niche!

Paid promotion in social media can also bring you some success. For this you will need to find bloggers who are popular enough and work in your niche. Otherwise, you will not get your target audience and you will have no results.

Link Building Strategies

• Broken links

If you know a website that has a broken link to a post on your topic, then connect to the webmaster and politely offer him or her to replace the broken link with one to your blog post.

• Infographics

If your post contains infographics, then try to share it. Readers and webmasters like infographics and they are most likely to post them with a link to your blog page if your infographic is of high quality.

• Skyscraper Technique

If you know that there is an old article on the same topic and you know for sure that you wrote a better and more up-to-date article, you can go to the webmaster of that site and ask to put a link to your blog post with fresher information.

• Link round up

If you get the chance, then take part in a link round-up. They are organized by websites with high domain authority and only great content can take part. This is a really good chance to show your website to the audiences of bigger websites.

• Ask friends

If you have friends who are webmasters, you can ask them to put a link to your blog post on their website.

• You can always use WebCEO’s Content Submission Tool, which will provide a list of places where you can submit your post.

[BONUS] How to Optimize an Infographic

Infographics have, for a long time, been one of the most popular ways to present information. People seek them and SEO experts always outline their value. It has even become a link building strategy: “Make an infographic and share it”.

People adore infographics for the following reasons:

1. They present difficult information in the simplest way;
2. They are bright and pretty – it is a pleasure for users to read those and people remember more information when they see it in images;
3. You will never see tons of information in an infographic – only essential facts without dilution;

Bonus fact: infographics increase traffic by up to 6%.

Optimization:

• Make a really great infographic

This concerns everything: select a topic which can be beneficially outlined with the help of infographics, design your infographic so no reader will be disturbed. You should take care of colors which will not make people’s eyes hurt, comfortable scripts, a general layout, and of course pieces of information which will be used. Everything matters and you should be prepared properly.

• Keyword optimization

Before uploading your infographic, make sure that you’ve done proper keyword research. Since texts in infographics can’t be read by Google, you will have to work on other aspects, like tags and file names, in order to make them visible on the Internet beyond your website’s page.

• SEO

There are some factors you should consider to make your infographic SEO friendly:

1. file size: make your infographic of a small size, but of good quality, and this way it will load fast and readers will not wait for a long time;

2. mobile friendliness: a page with an infographic should be set for mobile devices, because people nowadays prefer to read information from smartphones and tablets;

3. social sharing: set a plugin which will help readers to share your infographic in social media quick and easy; this will bring you more traffic.

IN CONCLUSION, high quality blog posts and infographics are valuable nowadays both for readers and Google. However, they will never be found if you don’t conduct decent optimization and it doesn’t matter how much effort you’ve put in to the infographic itself. Each detail should be perfect and prepared diligently. Start your content optimization with WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool! Find your best keywords and get more traffic.

The post How to Make Your Content King: Blog Posts & Infographics Optimization appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

If you are making your own website for the first time, you are probably using the WordPress platform. Even if it’s your second or tenth website, this platform is still likely to be your choice. WordPress powers 43.2% of the Internet. Its recipe for popularity: easy, quick and painless website construction!

If only competing against nearly a half of the whole Internet was just as easy, right?

Whatever you use to create a website, getting it on the first page of Google will never be easy. Do you still want to rank high? In that case, say hello to your new friend: WordPress SEO. This tutorial guide lists all the important things to know about the subject.

1. Find and use the best keywords

As per usual with SEO, your first decision is the most critical. Websites gain traffic through keywords. What keywords should you use?

There are two major factors that will maximize your traffic: being on Google’s page #1 and optimizing for the most effective keywords. Whether or not a keyword is effective depends on its ability to bring users to your site. Search volume is the number of users searching for any given keyword – the hard limit of how many users a keyword can attract (the more, the better). So that will be your first step: finding the keywords that will bring you the audience you want and have the highest search volume.

This is where SEO tools come in. Find the most optimal keywords for your site with WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions.

You can even find keywords that you are already ranking for, but aren’t using, in a related tool: Keywords from Search Console. Remember to add the keywords you want to use into the Keyword Basket by clicking the plus sign to the right of each word – this step is going to make your job a lot easier.

Lastly, you can use the keywords that your competitors are using themselves. This is best done in three steps:

1. Find your competitors’ keywords with WebCEO’s Spy on Competitors tool. If you remembered to fill the Keyword Basket with your own keywords before, you’ll easily spot the keywords you aren’t using yet.

2. Check how your competitors are ranking for the keywords you selected. To do that, open the Competitor Rankings by Keyword report and add the keywords you’ve found into the Settings.

3. Notice the keywords which don’t help your competitors rank high enough (for example, on the 2nd page of Google). Congratulations! You have some good keywords which can help you outrank your competition.

Now just start using your keywords in these places:

• Page title and META description. WordPress even helps you stay within the character limit for both.
• Page URL. Note that short URLs are better than long ones as they get more clicks in Google.
• H1-H4 HTML tags.
• Image names, ALT attributes and captions.
• Text on your site.
• Anchor texts of your internal links.

Here are a few more tips for using keywords most effectively:

• Short URLs are better than long ones. URLs that don’t get truncated in Google search results get more clicks because users can read and understand them.
• Don’t use “stop words” such as articles and prepositions in your URLs.
• Use your main keywords in the first paragraphs of your articles.

And, most importantly, keep track of how well you are ranking for your keywords. Set WebCEO’s My Site Rankings tool to generate regular reports for you.

2. Build links to your site

Backlinks are the most powerful ranking factor, not in the least due to being very hard to get at times. The more backlinks you have, the closer you are to ranking first in Google. Of course, link building isn’t as simple as just getting a bunch of backlinks from any old site and calling it a day. There are certain rules you should follow if you don’t want your WordPress site to be barred from Google’s page #1 or even penalized.

Build your links:

• From sites with a high domain authority
• From sites that are contextually related to your site
• From multiple domains – the more, the better
• Both dofollow and nofollow
• Without paying for them (being in some paid high value directories may be an exception)

Most of the methods of building links involve promoting your content and offering it to people who may be interested. The best way to find those interested parties is to look up the sites linking to your direct competitors. If those sites link to content that’s thematically similar to yours, why should they not link to you?

Find the sites where you can get backlinks with WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy, where the default sort is for backlinks that more than one of your competitors have.

Additionally, watch out for low-quality backlinks that could lower your rankings. Find them with the Toxic Pages tool and get rid of them in any way you like: manually, with another person’s help or with the Google Disavow tool.

3. Reduce your page load time

The faster your website loads, the better for everyone. Users don’t like waiting, so a fast-loading site makes them happy. Google likes it when users are happy, so it rewards fast-loading sites with higher ranking positions. And that, in turn, makes you happy.

It’s very rare for everyone to be pleased, which makes this worth pursuing. So how do you make your site load faster?

• Host your site on a fast server
• Or host it on a content delivery network
• Enable browser caching in the .htaccess file
• Enable compression using software like Gzip
• Minimize HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and other code on your site
• Optimize your images to have a low file size while remaining high-quality
• Merge elements that are separate but can work as a single element, such as images
• Get rid of excessive page redirects
• Stay on alert for technical errors that slow down your site

Want to know how good your site is at loading, on a scale of 0 to 100? Scan it now with WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool and see what else you can do.

4. Fix technical errors

A small leak will sink a great ship, as they say. If you want a top-notch user experience on your site, you will need to make sure it runs like clockwork. You never know what kind of error will reduce your website from a money-making machine into a pile of useless pages, so it’s best to have none at all.

What sort of technical pitfalls can you anticipate on your WordPress site? Here are some of the errors that ruin a user’s day:

• Broken links
• Server errors
• Plugin errors
• Images not showing
• Entire pages not showing

Worried you might be suffering from some (or all) of those at this very moment? Run a technical audit on your site now and keep doing it at least once a week. Your users will thank you later.

There are also many other types of errors that don’t affect users directly, but get in the way of your running the site (such as errors in the admin dashboard). Those can be tricky to fix, but thankfully, there is a helpful guide by WPBeginner that covers most of them.

Remember: low-quality sites that provide a poor user experience have no place on Google’s page #1. Be worthy of high rankings.

5. Create a sitemap

While you don’t need every page on your site added into Google’s index, it is true that most of them have to be. “Not indexed” equals “not found in search”. Think of the most important landing page on your site. Now imagine nobody can find it on Google.

Normally, pages get indexed as soon as Google crawls them. If your site is small enough and you are able to place a dofollow link to every page, you can pretty much sit back, relax and let Google take care of everything. Owners of big websites have no such luxury; they need sitemaps to do the job.

So just generate a sitemap of your website. You can use WebCEO’s Sitemap Generation tool.

It will create an XML sitemap with the pages that you don’t need indexed, such as robots.txt, automatically blocked. Then you can submit this to Google with no more than another button press.

Alternatively, you could create an HTML sitemap. It’s a bit different from XML sitemaps, which are more Google-friendly (whereas HTML ones are user-friendly). In some cases, it can be beneficial to use both types at the same time.

You can easily generate an HTML sitemap with a WordPress plugin, such as Simple Sitemap.

6. Use Google Search Console

Search Console is an indispensable tool in every SEO campaign. What makes it so?

• You will want to find out if your site is suffering from one of Google’s manual actions, security issues or other urgent problems;
• You can detect other problems yourself, such as errors in the schema markup on your site;
• You can manually index and deindex your pages;
• You can give or restrict access to all this information to other users you might work with;

And that’s far from everything Search Console can do for you.

Of course, if you’ve worked with it before, you know how clunky it can be (even its new version). Many SEO tools integrate Search Console exactly for that reason: to give users easier access to all vital information while keeping it as simple as possible.

Some of WebCEO’s tools use the data from Google Search Console to help you with website optimization and the interfaces are more user friendly than at Search Console itself. This data includes:

• Search queries that bring you traffic. Find keywords that already work for you, but you aren’t using them as actively as you could. This information is available in WebCEO’s Top Queries report.
• Your site’s performance in Google (clicks, impressions, average positions and click-through rates). This information can be found in the section named after the real thing, Google Search Console. You can easily harvest keywords there to use for rank tracking.

7. Use Google Analytics

Another must-have tool in SEO is Google Analytics.

Just like Google Search Console, it’s completely free and immensely useful for a number of purposes. However, it shares the same flaw of being clunky if you try to use Google’s own version of that tool.

If you have a Google Analytics account, you can connect it to your project in WebCEO. There are two ways to do it:

• When creating a project, the wizard will prompt you to connect a GA account.

• If you already have a project: open the Google Analytics reports, choose the email connected to your GA project and click the Continue button.

And that’s it!

Now you can analyze your website traffic and activity without having to feel like you are cutting a path through the jungle with a machete – which sounds awesome in theory, but is actually pretty exhausting.

What kind of information does WebCEO’s Google Analytics retrieve from GA?

• Bounce rates: an indispensable metric for finding pages that don’t satisfy your users.
• Conversion rates: another invaluable metric for measuring your online campaign’s success.
• Traffic analysis: all the various means visitors are using to reach your site, be it Google, social media, links from other sites or even direct typing in the browser’s address bar. Helpful when you want to know which sources could bring you more traffic with additional effort from your side.

8. Use schema markup

A normal Google search result doesn’t have much going for it. Page title, META description, URL address… That’s all. It looks so bland that even a single extra element is enough to make a huge difference. Compare these:

Two results for the same search query. Which one would you rather click? I’ll be surprised if you don’t answer “the prettier one”.

You can turn your website’s search results into click magnets like the one on the picture by using structured data. WordPress enables plugins like Schema to make the job a lot easier than it usually is.

Remember to test your schema-enhanced pages with the Schema Markup Validator. You might have errors that need fixing.

9. Involve social media

Being active in social media doesn’t necessarily help your site rank higher, but your social media pages can rank by themselves and can be found via searches in highly used social media platforms. Google should never be your only source of user traffic, and social media packs enough power to rival the search giant. Build your online presence everywhere you may find your audience!

And WordPress sites have an advantage there. They possess everything they need to be social media-friendly – namely, a multitude of plugins to connect you with your users. Here are a few of the things they can do:

• Embed buttons on your site for sharing articles
• Schedule your articles to be automatically posted on your social media pages
• Place widgets that link to your social media pages
• Allow users to comment on your site using their social media accounts

A healthy union, don’t you agree?

Of course, you won’t be the only one actively using WordPress social media plugins; your toughest competitors must be doing it, too. Who’d want to fall behind those losers? In order to see how close you are to overtaking them, keep track of your and their social media engagement with WebCEO’s Competitor Social Citations report.

10. Tighten up your security

Cybercrime isn’t quite as rampant as in cyberpunk fiction yet, but we are getting there. Users are greatly concerned about the safety of their sensitive information, and they’ll run at the slightest whiff of danger. For example, “Not secure” in the browser’s address bar is pretty good at scaring them away.

Find the weaknesses in your security before the bad guys beat you to it! Here’s what you can do to protect your site and users.

• Move your site to HTTPS if it’s still on HTTP
• Use SSL certificates
• Keep your plugins up-to-date
• Inform users about your use of cookies and ask for their consent
• Use a CDN with data centers in multiple locations
• Use a strong password for your admin dashboard (and change it every now and then)
• Add a web application firewall
• Use as few add-ons and plugins as possible

11. Use SEO plugins

WordPress is synonymous with creating websites easily and quickly, and for the same reason it’s also very plugin-friendly. It’s little wonder that people have made tons of plugins to make their websites work even better – which, of course, includes SEO plugins.

What are SEO plugins for? They make it easier to optimize your content. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things they can do:

• Finding broken links
• Finding missing HTML tags
• Finding titles and descriptions that are above or below the optimal length
• Finding duplicate content
• Integrating AMP
• Implementing structured data
• Setting up local SEO business information

Seriously, it’s easier to say what they can’t do.

And the best part is, even the really good plugins are 100% free!

Installing plugins is easy as pie. Just go to the Plugins section in your WordPress site’s dashboard and find a plugin you like. Click its Install button, then Activate to start it. That’s it! Your new plugin is ready for work.

Now, what plugin (or plugins) should you set up? The number one recommended plugin for website optimization is Yoast SEO. Schema is also an absolute must if you want to work with structured data. Site owners often use them together with All in One SEO Pack, SEO Framework, SEOPress and others, depending on the features they need. There is no perfect combination; it’s purely a matter of preference for everybody.

Remember to update your plugins often! They might have weaknesses that hackers can exploit to attack your site.

12. Engage with your audience in the comment section

What better way to bond with your audience than to chat with them directly? That’s why the Internet was invented: communication. It would be silly not to use the richest gift the Net has to offer if it can help you achieve your business goals.

Make full use of your site’s comment section! Fortunately, it’s already included in the package for most (if not all) WordPress sites, so that spares you the trouble of setting one up yourself. What can you do?

• Ask your visitors to leave comments at the end of your articles.
• Reply to your commenters’ feedback, whether it’s questions or just compliments.
• Fight spam in your comment section. There are many ways to do it: delete spammy comments, remove links from them, set up a Captcha verification, or just disable comments altogether like a true intellectual.
• Enable pingbacks to make link building easier. A pingback is a comment that tells you when somebody else has linked to your WordPress site from theirs. In order for this to work, both sites must be on WordPress and have pingbacks enabled in their settings.
• Should you enable or disable extra “comment pages”? Unless your articles gather hundreds of comments, or you worry about your page loading time, it’s safe to disable and let user comments be a long strip instead of multiple pages.

13. Link between your site’s pages

Linking from one page to another on your site fulfils several purposes:

• It leads users to more of the content they may like and find useful.
• It keeps users on your site longer, increasing dwell time and signaling to Google that they had a good user experience.
• It directs the flow of link juice between pages, increasing the authority of the pages you want to rank higher.

Moral of the story: post many articles on your WordPress site and interlink the ones that are relevant to each other. But do it smartly. It takes two steps:

1. Find the pages with the highest authority on your site

2. Link from them to the pages with lower authority

The first task can be accomplished with WebCEO’s Page Authority Analysis module. Simply sort the pages by page authority by clicking on the appropriate column’s title.

Then use your best judgment and decide which of your authority giants should share link juice with their little brothers.

14. Design a good site navigation

It is recommended to build websites with an efficient structure in mind. What is an efficient website structure? It’s a way to interlink site pages that, when put as a drawing, resembles a tree. Kind of like this:

It’s simple enough when there aren’t a lot of elements between the home page and the landing page. But what if that’s not the case? If there are too many categories and subcategories, users might struggle when navigating through your website. That can’t be good for their user experience.

In those situations, you can make it easier for users by setting up these things:

• Navigation bar: for links to your most important pages. If you are heavy on categories and subcategories, it’s recommended to put them in your navigation, too.

• Breadcrumbs: those lines of text reminding the users where they are. They look like this:

• Footer bar: for links to pages such as “About us” and “Contact us”, as well as external links to your social media pages.

15. WWW vs. non-WWW

Have a look at these URLs. Are they different, or are they the same?

• http://example.com
• https://example.com
• http://www.example.com
• https://www.example.com

As a user, you intuitively know they’ll show you the exact same page no matter which URL you put into your browser. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with search engines. Google will see four different pages and index them all separately, and that means SEO problems with duplicate content.

In order to avoid those problems, stick to only one version of your site’s URLs and deindex the rest. If you can’t do away with the other versions completely and have to keep them around, set up 301 redirects leading to the main version.

Next question is: which URL version is the best?

Obviously, https is better than http for security reasons. What about the www part? SEO-wise, it makes no difference. However, www websites have a truly life-saving perk their non-www brothers don’t have.

See, providers often have countermeasures for server failure. When it happens to you, certain providers can redirect your traffic to another server and thus keep your site working. In order to do all this, providers need your DNS CNAME record… which – you guessed it – is a www-only thing.

Another reason has to do with site speed. A common SEO practice is to host static content on a subdomain. If you have a non-www website, its cookies will be sent to the subdomain, which will slow down the access to the static content and potentially even cause issues with caching. Websites with www don’t have this problem (unless you manually set them to send cookies to subdomains).

And that’s why the most optimal URL format for your WordPress site is https://www.example.com.

Afterword

So there you have it. To summarize, in order to make your WordPress SEO bring results, you need three things:

1. Make full use of the WordPress platform’s functionality;

2. Invest in on-page and off-page site optimization;

3. Use SEO tools.

Now that you’ve read this guide, none of those should be a problem for you. Remember to keep your ear to the ground for the newest WordPress features and SEO trends: doing so will help you stay one step ahead of your competition. Your chances will be even better if you have the best SEO tools to make your job faster and easier.

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The post WordPress SEO Tutorial: How to Optimize WordPress Sites appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Podcasts have it rough. As a medium, they have to compete with much more popular videos and blogs. Most people don’t even stumble upon a podcast unless they are deliberately looking for one. Yet the fight goes on, and here are some 2023 podcast statistics to prove it: well over a third of the USA population listen to them regularly, and 27% chime in every week. Go podcasts go!

But ultimately, all pieces of content end up duking it out for the top positions on Google in a worldwide battle royale – podcasts or not. Naturally, being less popular than others is a liability. Fortunately, Google’s ranking algorithm can work in someone’s favor. With enough effort, anyone can get to the top and sit on the throne.

So let’s look into SEO for podcasts – the only way to beat the more popular media at their own game.

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Why do podcasts need SEO?

How successful your podcast will be depends on two things: quality and uniqueness. Site optimization comes third, not first and not even second. If your podcasts aren’t good or users have already listened to something similar elsewhere, no amount of SEO is going to help you.

That should make your priorities clear. Worry about SEO only after you have podcasts users will love. Account for everything: audio, visuals (if you have them), spoken content and site features.

Moving on to podcast SEO. It has two primary goals: ranking in Google and ranking on the podcast platforms you are using. Make progress in either (or, better yet, in both), and you can expect an increase in:

• Plays
• Downloads
• Subscribes
• Shares
• Reviews
• Ratings
• Conversions

There’s also the side effect of gaining fame in your niche, if you are into that. If your main focus is making money, then conversions are going to be your major point of interest. For that, site optimization is vital.

So where do you start?

1. What every podcast should have

Fitting what was said earlier, the first step of podcast SEO will not be related to SEO at all. When you are chasing high rankings, quality is a priority. As with videos on YouTube (which is a popular option for podcast hosting), only high-quality content will get you anywhere.

Other than podcasts with great audio, visuals and material, what does a high-quality podcast site need? Here’s your recipe for perfection.

• Smart placement. Place your podcasts above the fold so users can play them right away. Don’t make your visitors scroll through text and images first. Murphy’s law will kick in, and they won’t scroll at all.
• Subscribe button. Here’s another element that should be put where everybody can see it. Subscribers are the single most important ranking factor for podcasts, which makes your subscribe button the most important call-to-action.
• Transcript and summary with takeaways. This kills three birds with one stone. First, users can’t always listen to your podcasts when they come to your site, but they can read what it’s about instead. Second, it lets them know your podcast actually has the content they need. And third, that’s where you can put keywords for Google!
• Clickable timestamps. You know how you can write the time in a YouTube comment, and then clicking on it will send you to the corresponding moment in the video? Make your timestamps work just like that. It’s a superior user experience compared to manually looking for the time you need.
• Related episodes. Place a few of them in the sidebar where users can easily find them.
• Outbound links that open in a new tab. The underlined part is important! If a link starts loading a new page in the same tab, the exit intent popup will not appear, and you’ll lose your chance to get a new subscriber.
• Share buttons. It goes without saying that your podcasts must be sharable in social media. Use a WordPress plugin (or any other means you prefer) to set up the necessary buttons.
• Email opt-in form. No need to hide it behind a button or anything; excessive clicks are nothing but an obstacle before conversions. Put it boldly in plain view to make it clear what you are about: your content in exchange for the users’ emails.

Once you’ve checked everything in this list, you can say your podcast website has the bare minimum that’s needed for the fight. Now, onto SEO.

2. Find keywords and use them wisely

When we talk about optimizing websites for Google, we usually mean placing keywords at strategic spots. Where do podcasts need keywords?

• Titles (or episode names for podcasts)
• Meta descriptions
• Meta keywords (Google ignores this, but some podcast platforms like iTunes rely on it)
• H1-H4 headings
• Image filenames and ALT attributes
• Categories and tags
• Transcripts
• Timestamps
• Episode recaps
• Checklists
• Notes

No doubt you have your own keyword ideas, but they always need to be tested with specialized SEO tools. And if you don’t have any, that’s all the more reason to use those tools. Turn to WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions.

Type in your keyword idea and press Search. The tool will display information about your keyword and many others. Not all of the suggestions will be relevant to what you have in mind, so you’ll need to search through the generated list for the best keywords for your podcast.

How do you know the keywords are good? They’ll have these traits:

• Relevant to the podcast’s topic
• Have a high search volume (number of monthly searches)
• Clearly reflect user search intent

You can also check the Keywords from the Google Search Console section and find keywords that you aren’t using yet, but which you are already ranking for in Google. You’ll be surprised at how often this happens.

It is advisable to optimize each podcast episode for only one major keyword. That way, you’ll have more room for maneuver when you are recording more episodes on the same or related topics.

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3. Maximize your page speed

Fast-loading pages are a must for ranking high in Google and making it big on the Internet. With podcasts, they need to be fast-loading for the same reason. Neglecting the user experience has cost many a website dearly – don’t let yourself become yet another failure.

What do you need to make your site load quickly?

• Good hosting. A powerful server or a content delivery network would qualify for the job.
• Optimized images. Smaller files load faster, which is why you should always minimize your images’ file size (without sacrificing their quality, of course). You can do it by reducing their dimensions, saving them in the most optimal format and compressing them.
• Optimized page code. Are you skilled with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other languages that make web pages work? Simplify your site’s code and make it easier to process.
• Compression software. Gzip being the most popular, there are compression tools which greatly reduce your site’s elements’ file size.
• Fewer elements on pages. The less stuff on your site, the less time it takes to load it all. Design your site to provide the user experience you want with as little as possible.
• Browser caching. Set the expiry dates for your site’s elements (such as images, CSS and JS files) in its .htaccess file. Doing so will make the users’ browsers host those elements locally for a time and load them faster.
• Host your podcasts on external platforms. If you host them on your own site, they will drastically increase your page load times, which is the last thing you want.
• Test your site with WebCEO’s Page Speed tool.

High page load times are a problem you need to take care of as soon as possible. Test your site at least once a week to be fully informed of your situation; if your speed drops, you’ll need to know why.

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4. Make your site mobile-friendly

You must’ve heard about Google’s mobile-first index – it was a hot topic for years long before they actually rolled it out in 2018. As the name suggests, it ranks websites based on the user experience they provide when browsed from mobile devices. Your site may work like a charm on a PC, but if it’s not as good when viewed on mobile devices, then the majority of Internet users will slip right past you. And that can’t end well for your podcasts.

How do you optimize your site for mobile?

• Page loading speed – see the above section for tips on improving it.
• Use of negative space. Cluttering small screens is how you ruin the user experience. Leave some room both between the lines of text and between other individual elements.
• Large fonts to make your text easy to read on a small screen, especially above the fold. That’s the space where most of the users decide if they will stay on the page or not.
• No intrusive interstitials that will badly affect UX. That includes banners and popups. What it does not include: age verification popups, disclaimers about the use of cookies, exit intent popups.
• Responsive design.

This one is easier than it sounds, but it still requires a detailed explanation. You will need to work on three things to make your site responsive: viewport, images and text.

• To make your viewport responsive, add this line of code in all your pages: <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0″>.
• For images, use the max-width property. Like this: <img src=”img_girl.jpg” style=”max-width:100%;”>.
• Text is made responsive by setting its vw (“viewport width”) units. For example: <p style=”font-size:12vw;”>Text</p>. 1 vw is equal to 1% of viewport width.

Additionally, you can use frameworks like Bootstrap to make your web pages responsive.

Check your site’s mobile friendliness with WebCEO’s Mobile Optimization tool.

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5. Use internal links

When users come to your site, you want them to visit more than one page. This is even truer for podcasts: you want a loyal audience that can’t get enough of what you have to say. How could anyone turn them down?

That’s why smart website owners adopt the “ask and you shall receive” principle in regard to their users. When they stop by to listen to one of your episodes, always leave a link to another episode somewhere close. Preferably two or three links to related episodes.

Category pages are also a must: it’s really convenient, both for users and yourself, when all thematically related podcasts are grouped together on one page.

Internal linking comes with benefits other than the user experience, too: it distributes authority between your pages, helping them rank higher, and allows search engine bots to crawl your site. You might even want to look up the most authoritative pages on your site and make them share some of their juice by linking to the podcast. For that, refer to WebCEO’s Page Authority Analysis tool.

6. Gain more backlinks

Podcast sites can get easy dofollow backlinks from podcast hosting platforms, such as iTunes. But if everyone has backlinks from there, that won’t be anywhere near enough to make you rank high in Google. There’s a need for good old traditional link building, too.

Building links to your podcasts is pretty similar to doing the same for other sites. There’s only one real problem: finding websites that will link to you. Fortunately, this problem is easily solved in two steps.

1. Make a list of other, more successful podcasts in your niche;
2. Analyze them with WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy tool.

Check the sites where your competitors get their backlinks and try building some of your own there.

The problem with podcast link building is, backlinks from high-authority sites will be extremely rare. You’ll see for yourself that most of the backlinks will be from low-authority sites. That’s why backlinks from high DA sites will be real game-changers if you manage to build even a few.

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And there’s one other, much easier way to get backlinks for your podcast site without any tools for SEO. Simply work together with others. Either do joint podcasts with people who have websites, or be a guest on somebody else’s podcast.

7. Use social media

As always, social media is your friend when you want some extra exposure for your content. The tricky part is figuring out how to use it to its full potential. Posting everything you have on your Facebook page isn’t enough.

What else can you do?

• Always share your podcasts in popular social networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, any you can think of. The more of them you involve, the more listeners you’ll get.
• Implement a “share” button on your site. It will let your visitors share your podcasts on their pages, which is even better than sharing them on your own.
• Use hashtags wherever appropriate.
• Create previews and sneak peeks of your podcasts. Share them before uploading the full thing to get your listeners curious.
• Record your podcast on Facebook Live and Instagram Live. Streaming services with temporary hosting are powerful tools that play on the audience’s fear of missing out.
• Track mentions of your podcasts. For that, you can use free tools like Google Alerts or WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring.
• Track user engagement on your social media pages. If users start giving you fewer likes, shares and comments, you will need to know when that happens so you can take timely action. Refer to WebCEO’s Page Metrics report for this information.

8. Make your podcasts generate clicks

It’s not enough to get yourself on Google’s first page. Once you are there, you need to maintain the momentum and keep getting clicks, or your search results will be pushed further and further down until they are no longer in the top 10.

Some podcasts get more clicks in Google than others. They must have some sort of a secret. Can you do it, too? Certainly.

1. Titles, descriptions and URLs.

Being the three major elements of all search results, they share a lot of things in common that affect their ability to get clicks.

• Podcast’s subject: don’t forget to mention it in all three. If it’s also a mid- or long-tail keyword, all the better for your rankings.
• Readability: they must be comprehensive to users, even the URLs. Especially the often neglected URLs – it also helps a great deal to make them short and easy to remember.
• Character limits: vary this for each of the three, but they will all be cropped if you make them too long. Naturally, ending tags abruptly will make them less attractive to users.
• Words that naturally make users click: namely, things that users are greatly interested in. For example, if you release a joint episode with a fellow podcaster, you can easily attract more listeners by including that person’s name in the episode’s title. You’ll get another podcaster’s fans to visit your site.
• Calls-to-action: users will be more likely to visit you and listen to your podcast if you ask them directly in the description.

2. Structured data

Turn your search results into rich snippets, and you’ll start getting more clicks. This truth applies to all content, including podcasts. Here are some of the extra elements that will make your site more attractive:

• Picture
• Reviews
• Rating stars
• Episode length
• Links to other episodes

Use structured data (such as Schema or JSON-LD) to mark up your site pages and give them a different appearance in Google.

3. The website itself

Google isn’t the only place where you want to get clicks. Podcasts themselves badly need some love from users, too.

You want users to interact with your site in various ways: listening to your podcasts (obviously), sharing and commenting, subscribing and even buying if you have something to sell. What’s the decisive factor in all this? Your website’s design.

Ensure your site is made to guide users to everything they are meant to click.

• Put yourself in your users’ shoes. If you went through your pages as they are now, would you make the necessary clicks? Would it be an easy task for you, or would anything get in your way? If you find a problem, brainstorm the ways to change it for the better.
• Make all your “click me” elements (podcast controls, comment section, share and other kinds of buttons etc.) visible and easy to find.
• Have as few distractions as possible. Whatever you want your users to click must be the most noticeable on your pages. Usually, it’s the Subscribe button.
• Use a heat map generator (such as CrazyEgg) to see what users do on your pages. Heat maps can show you what users interact with and what they ignore, and you’ll be able to tweak your site’s design appropriately if necessary.

9. Get an RSS feed for your podcast

RSS is a great asset to sites that often release new content. Are you worried users might miss your new update? Ask them to subscribe to your RSS feed. Once they do, they’ll have a much easier time catching new episodes on your site.

If you already have an RSS feed, great; but double-check to make sure your podcasts are included in it. Sites with diverse content (such as blogs and forums) can have this problem where only some types of their content appear in the feed instead of all. If this is happening to you, create a separate RSS feed for your podcasts.

If you are in need of creating an RSS feed, that’s easy. There are plenty of sites which let you do it for free in only a few steps. It’s usually like this, in no particular order:

• Enter the URL of the page for which you want to create a feed;
• Create an account;
• Give your feed a title and a description;
• Copy the generated link to the feed;
• Create a button on your site with that link.

Once you’ve done that, users can subscribe to your very own RSS feed. Place the button somewhere visible.

Other than your site, be sure to have RSS feeds on the podcast directories where you host your episodes – iTunes, Apple and others.

10. Bonus: get more subscribers

While high rankings from doing SEO are great, people who want to listen to podcasts don’t usually look for them in Google. They may use it as a starting point once or twice, but when they are already familiar with podcasts, they’ll go straight to podcast directories. It’s the same as immediately going to Amazon for shopping, skipping Google completely.

The fun thing about podcast directory optimization is, it’s miles easier than Amazon search optimization or even SEO. Only one thing really determines your rankings in iTunes and Apple: how many people have subscribed to you in the last few days. Therefore, your goal is to maximize that number. How?

• High-quality podcasts to encourage users to subscribe.
• Exit-intent popups to catch the leaving users.
• A “thank you” message for users who have just subscribed.
• Email outreach to let your subscribers know about new content.
• An Apple smart banner. Create one for your site, and users who click on it will be sent to your show on Apple Podcasts. Simply add <meta name=”apple-itunes-app” content=”app-id=XXXXXXXXXX”> in your site’s <head> section, where XXXXXXXXXX is your unique numerical ID. You can find your ID at the end of your podcast page’s URL on iTunes or Apple.

Afterword

Now that your site and your podcasts are optimized, you can start watching the fruits of your labor grow. As you get more viewers and subscribers, your rankings will grow, both in the charts and Google.

To track your podcast rankings, you can browse Apple, iTunes and other platforms manually or use a podcast analytics tool. For your Google rankings, check with WebCEO’s Rank Tracking reports. Just feed it the keywords you are using on your site and watch how your ranking positions change over time.

The post SEO for Podcasts in 10 Steps: How to Rank #1 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.