So you’ve decided to move your content, replace some URLs or merge pages with duplicate content, but you want to keep things search-engine friendly and retain the value of your content.

How do you manage this correctly in terms of SEO? First, add a flexible tool to your arsenal – 301 redirects. Their primary purpose is to redirect the user and the search robot to the right place without losing link weights. However, improper configuration and other errors in the work with redirects can harm your rankings. In this article, we’ll tell you how to set up 301 redirects correctly, when you need them, and their meaning in SEO. In addition, you will learn about other types of redirects and how to deal with them.

When to use 301 redirects?

• Responsive design. The most popular redirect is redirecting the user from the desktop version of the site to the mobile version.
• When rebranding. In cases where you changed the brand name and moved to a site with a new domain name.
• When you switch to a secure connection protocol: change the HTTP protocol to HTTPS to protect yourself and your clients.
• To redirect from irrelevant pages/sites. For example, a product is no longer on sale, or you no longer provide a service and want to redirect the user to a page with a similar product or service.
• When sites or pages are duplicated. Similar content on several resources worsens the ranking, and if the sites or pages are identical, search engines will exclude these pages from the search. Permanent and temporary redirects will be helpful to avoid creating duplicates and risking ranking.
• With frequent queries with a www, if your site is without a www. You can be linked to both, but they are different sites for search engines, so it’s a good idea to set up a redirect to just one of the pages.
• When migrating to a new site engine. Each CMS has its own rules for generating URLs. If the address does not match the old one, you can not do without a redirect – otherwise, customers will never find you. 
• 404 pages. Sometimes it is necessary to set a redirection up from a broken page to a live one.

What is a 301 redirect in SEO?

301 redirect benefits for SEO:

• Save traffic;
• Prevent the loss of PageRank;
• Get rid of duplicate pages;
• Eliminate the presence of low-quality pages in the search results;
• Redirect the crawler (search bot) and the user from an irrelevant page or with a 404 server response code.

From a user experience standpoint, 301 redirects are helpful because they allow redirecting traffic to related products if the one they are looking for is deleted. Such practice reduces the probability of user bounce.

Some time after you set up the redirect, the search engine will update its index, replacing the old page address with the new one. Browsers and other types of clients will cache the new URL and automatically follow the redirect directly without checking the original for subsequent requests. Saved bookmarks are also usually updated.

How to set up 301 redirects?

There are many ways to make a 301 redirect: .htaccess, PHP, javascript, server settings, and others. We recommend not using all methods at once. There is too high a probability of discrepancies between different processes. The most commonly used way of configuration is through .htaccess. 

What is the .htaccess file for, and how to find it?

The .htaccess file is a configuration file that defines the rules of the web server in the directories and subdirectories where it is located. Most often, it will be the root folder of your site.

If you can’t find the .htaccess, there are a few options:

1. The file has a different name. It is scarce, but it is possible. The actual name can be clarified with the hosting provider: it can be, for example, .config, .htaccess.http, access.conf.
2. The file still needs to be created. This is the most common case. It is necessary to create a .htaccess file and write the redirection directives into it later.

Further info on .htaccess: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/htaccess/

How to create a new .htaccess file?

1. Create an empty text file with a .txt extension.
2. Rename it by removing the name and adding the extension .htaccess. 
3. If you work on macOS, a file with no name will not be visible. Then give it any name you want, and rename it after it is uploaded to the server.

Setting up 301 redirects in .htaccess with examples

We will use the conventional addresses of sites and pages to show you 301 redirect examples – you will need to replace them with yours.

301 redirect of one page

The easiest way is to use the Redirect directive. Try one of the options:

or

Redirect 301 /old-page/ https://your-site.com/new-page

You can also redirect with the module mod_rewrite:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/old-page/$

RewriteRule ^.*$ http://your-site.com/new-page/? [R=301,L]

301 redirect from the domain without WWW to the domain with WWW

It is necessary for gluing duplicate pages like sitexample.com and www.sitexample.com when you decide to make the leading site with the WWW prefix.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^site\.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

301 redirect from the domain with WWW to the domain without WWW

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.site.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

301 redirect using RewriteRule

RewriteRule is a directive of the .htaccess file, the mod_rewrite module, which defines URL conversion rules. Use it when you need to perform a mass 301 redirect.

By default, the mod_rewrite module is disabled. To enable it, you need to use the directives:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteBase /

The principle of the module is built using the rules according to which the URL is converted.

Two directives serve to define the rules:

• RewriteCond – defines the conditions under which the RewriteRule directive will be triggered. The number of RewriteCond conditions before the RewriteRule directive is unlimited.
• RewriteRule – sets the URL conversion rule.

Example of RewriteRule for redirection:

RewriteRule ^my-old-url\.html$ /my-new-url.html [R=301,L]

• The first part of the rule specifies the condition under which the URL conversion will be performed.
• The second part of the rule determines what the URL should be converted to.
• The third part of the rule (in square brackets) contains additional options called flags. It is optional. In our case, it includes the redirect code – R=301, as well as the flag L – “last rule,” which says to stop the URL conversion process if it matches the rule.

301 redirect from domain to domain

Used when it is necessary to stick together old and new pages after changing the domain.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^old-site.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.new-site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

301 redirect to HTTPS from HTTP

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

301 redirects from a page with a slash to a URL without a slash, and vice versa

On a URL without “/”

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.+)/$

RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ /$1 [R=301,L]

On a URL with a “/”

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^.]+$

RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]

But even with a ready-made code for different needs, something could go wrong, and the best option is to contact a programmer. Since it is possible that you accidentally catch another type of page or dynamic data that you need or something else, it is essential to check all pages after implementing the code.

How to set up a 301 redirect in WordPress?

At the beginning of 2019, approximately 75 million sites were implemented using CMS WordPress. It allows you to solve a wide range of tasks with the help of plugins. This is also true for 301 redirects. If you need to redirect from one page to another, it is unnecessary to involve a programmer. It will be enough to use a plugin.

301 redirect with the 301 Redirects plugin

1. Setup plugin and install it in WordPress
2. Configure the plugin. To do this, go to the “Settings” tab with the plugin’s name.

3. Select the type of redirect. The plugin allows you to implement different types of redirects: 301, 302, 307. To implement a redirect, you need to select the desired redirect type from the menu in the Redirect Rules tab:

4. Next, you need to specify the relative link of the page from which to perform the redirect and the link to which it should be committed. Then click the “save” button.

You can check the result after saving. To do this, enter the URL from which you made the redirect in the address bar. You should be redirected to the page whose URL you specified in the second field.

Important! If you have any problems with the redirect, make sure that all fields are filled in, and the cache is cleared. To do this, go to the Tools & Options tab and click on the Empty Cache button.

After clearing the cache, recheck the redirect.

When should you avoid 301 redirects?

No one should use a permanent redirect for temporary solutions; it is evident from its name. For temporary movement, use 302 Redirect Moved Temporarily. In this case, there will be no gluing of pages, and the site owner can restore the page with the redirect at any time.

If there are any problems with your domain, for example, filters or bans, and you decide to change the address of the site (domain), you should not make a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one – as a result, you will stick all the problems of the old domain to the new one. In the end, nothing will change.

Other Types of 3xx Redirects

302 Redirect – Moved Temporarily

Suitable for cases when some page or section of the site is under technical maintenance. You can redirect users to a copy of the old page version at this time. It is a signal for the search engine that removing the donor page from the index is unnecessary, and there is no need to index the acceptor page. 

However, if the 302 redirects stand for a long time, the search bot may consider this a permanent move and make appropriate changes in the index.

We know about the practice when online shop owners set up a 302 redirect for a product that is out of stock. We don’t recommend doing this. It’s better to specify that the product is out of stock now and add a block with similar or exciting products on this page.

303 and 307 Redirect 

307 redirects (Temporary Redirect) is an exact copy of the 303 (Found) redirect for search engines. It is a temporary redirection of traffic to a new page with all the parameters of the original page.

These types are used when there is a need to redirect the user to another page that does not contain an exact answer but is a partial replacement of the search query.

303 and 307 redirects have been created to differentiate between the two supposed features of the 302 response code. In practice, no SEOs intentionally use either of them. 

304 Redirect – Not Modified 

Browsers can send a request that asks if the resource has been modified. We can assist the browser by controlling The Last-Modified and If-Modified-Since headers to enter information about the last editing of a web page.

The primary purpose of using If-Modified-Since and Last-Modified headers is to ensure that cached information is updated efficiently. Cache management will help improve page load speeds, as well as improve overall website performance and, thus, user experience.

From an SEO point of view, monitoring cache updates is very important because it can improve the crawling and indexing of the site.

You do remember that each site has a specific crawling budget, and the task of the optimizer is to use it as effectively as possible.

The 304 redirect is the most helpful for owners of large sites who meet problems with scanning. The search robot scans pages that are non-priority and may never get to the necessary content. For example, the ‘About us’ page is frequently scanned because there is a link to it on every site page in the header or footer. Therefore, the robot may consider it important, but it is not.

By configuring If-Modified-Since and Last-Modified, you can show the robot which pages you updated and which have remained unchanged.

305 Redirect – Use Proxy 

305 redirects occur when the requested resource is available only through a proxy server. The web browser is expected to repeat the request through the proxy.

Some browsers (Mozilla, Internet Explorer) mismanage this status. Most likely, they regard the fact that the request is not sent directly to the server as insecure.

Programmers use proxy servers for various purposes, ranging from anonymity to the need to cache content to speed up page loading.

We note that many search engines ignore this code and, in fact, abandon it.

306 Redirect – Switch Proxy

Initially, the 306 response code signaled that the client must use a specific proxy server. It is no longer relevant and remains reserved.

308 Redirect – Permanent Redirect

This response code is similar to a 301 redirect, with the only difference being that it does not allow you to change the request method from POST to GET. It’s also automatically cached and passes internal weight to the new page.

It’s worth noting that this response code is experimental.

There are other use cases for the 308 redirect. For example, Google Drive redirects with a 308 response code to show that a data download was interrupted.

Which redirects should SEO experts use?

We work with the following redirects: 301, 302, 304, 307, 308. But we actually use 301, 304, and 302. Can you guess why?

Yes, because all browsers, clients, and search engines do not yet love the 307 and 308 server response codes. So let’s communicate with them in a language they understand.

Most Common Mistakes With Redirects

Redirect robots.txt

When changing a site’s domain, the owner sometimes sets up a mass redirect of all pages and files, including the robots.txt file. But, to glue domains faster for search engines, the robots.txt on the old domain should be available for scanning, not redirected.

The acceptor page is not relevant to the donor.

The main advantage of 301 redirects for SEO is the transfer of weight and authority from the old page to the new page. However, if you put a redirect to a page that is irrelevant to the donor – with different information, a completely different product – then the search engines will consider it wrong. The weight will not be fully transferred. In some cases, the search engine will not consider it a redirect at all.

Redirect chains

We can often encounter situations of multiple-page redirects.

For example, you delete page A and redirect to page B. Later you delete B and redirect to page C. As a result, a user who wants to go to page A is first redirected to page B and then to C. The robot may not understand why you’re doing this.

Ideally, the redirect on page A should be fixed by putting it right on page C. And here, the robot is happy – the redirect is done correctly.

What’s wrong with redirect chains:

• They slow down the opening of the final page, worsen the behavioral performance of the site and Core Web Vitals;
• Search robots can handle no more than five redirects;
• Increase the risk of redirect loops leading to the page’s inaccessibility.

You can detect redirect chains with WebCEO’s Technical Audit Tool for free. Just add your project, and it will be automatically scanned. Afterward, move to the Site Health menu and check if your site has any redirect chains.

Redirect loops

A fictional example: you have set up a redirect from page A to page B and from there to page C. But page C is already redirected to page A. We get a vicious redirect loop. All URLs in the chain become inaccessible to users and search engines.

In practice, redirect loops often occur when mass redirect rules are confused: pages with and without the slash, with and without WWW, etc.

You should avoid redirecting loops because they negatively affect your ranking by increasing the content loading time, wasting crawling budgets, and decreasing link weight.

Pages with code 301 remained in the sitemap.

You must remove URLs with 301 redirects from sitemap.xml. Otherwise, the search robot will spend its crawling budget to crawl these pages.

Redirect to the 404 page

Check the relevance of redirects on the site regularly, especially after cardinal restructuring and removal of irrelevant pages. It often happens that you put a redirect, but after some time, the URL acceptor was deleted, or it became inaccessible because of technical errors. As a result, redirects lead nowhere to a broken link.

Unusual Ways to Create Redirects (Redirects via meta refresh, javascript, and PHP)

PHP redirects

The main feature of the redirect in PHP is that redirection is not written in the page’s code but with the help of a script on the server. This reduces the susceptibility to search engine filters. You need to find the PHP file in the site’s root folder and enter a line of code for the appropriate redirect.

This type is slower than .htaccess, but if you have hundreds of pages that need to be redirected and want to do it selectively rather than all of them, PHP might be the best choice.

JavaScript redirects

This differs from the previous ones in that the redirection takes place on the browser side, not the server side. Therefore, the redirection speed is drastically reduced because the script must fully load to perform actions.

When do you use this? For example, when you move to a new site, it displays a message like “you will now be automatically redirected to our new site.”

The JavaScript redirect should be set up in the page’s source code from which the redirect comes by changing the text between the <head>-</head> tags.

HTML redirect or meta-refresh

A browser type of redirect. It is a meta tag, which usually specifies the delay time and the page to which the user is redirected.

Example code for a meta refresh tag with a redirect delay of 2 seconds:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”2;https://livepage.pro”>

The meta-refresh has a bad reputation among search engines, as this method has often been used to redirect to doorways. In addition, meta-refresh has other disadvantages:

• Is not supported by all browsers;
• Leads to crawl errors. The search robot does not crawl the page on which the refresh meta tag is located but goes directly to the one to which the redirection leads;
• Can be defined by Google as spam with appropriate sanctions;
• Google bots may ignore pages with this meta tag and not index them.

However, in some cases, the use of such a redirect may be appropriate, for example, for:

• Redirecting the visitor to the gratitude page after placing an order;
• “Backing up” redirects implemented in JavaScript – if the visitor’s browser does not support scripts;
• Redirecting the visitor to the page with links to download the correct browsers – if his browser displays your site with errors.

Summary

1. A 301 redirect is a significant SEO optimization tool that improves the user experience and communication with search engine robots. It allows you to save the weight of pages, glue them together, save traffic, and retain the user. However, it’s crucial that you use the correct type of redirect status code for your purpose to get the correct outcome.
2. There are different ways to implement 301 redirects. The most common are edits in the web server configuration file (.htaccess). When implementing 301 redirects through the .htaccess file, site owners use classic 301 redirects or the RewriteRule directive.
3. It is unnecessary to involve a programmer in implementing 301 redirects on different CRMs. The task is easily solved using modules or platform features.
4. There are many different redirects, but 301, 302, and 304 will affect your SEO 98% of the time.
5. Avoid redirect chains and redirect loops, as they can seriously worsen your rankings.
6. Be very careful, and be active in checking the result of your settings. When working with redirects, it is easy to make mistakes and affect other pages or files. 

To make sure your site is search-engine friendly, check your site for technical issues and redirects with the help of the WebCEO Auditor Tool. 

Fix Your Faulty Redirects Sign Up Free

The post Redirects In Modern SEO: Do’s and Do Not’s 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.

Part III: Track Your Success

We’ve come to the last but not least part of our social media optimization journey. Today you will learn how to analyze the results of your social media optimization campaign and what instruments you might need for this task.

TRACK YOUR SUCCESS

Step #1: How to Track the Results of Your Social Media Campaign

[ Quantify your success with Social Analytics Tools ]

Social media marketing ranges from “somewhat effective” to “very effective” for businesses.

Your results will come in figures. Real success comes in high figures.

A lot of statistics for business accounts are provided by social media platforms in the form of APIs. Through WebCEO or stand-alone social media analytics tools, you can access these data pipes. You will need to analyze percentages, graphs, and diagrams. The advantage of using tools is they offer a coherent investigation and control over your performance on multiple social media platforms starting from the research steps and going straight to the gathering of results.  

Let’s learn some of them:

1. Buffer

Buffer is a platform where, apart from analyzing the results of your content promotion, you can publish on major social media platforms. You will get access to the following helpful features:

• post writing and planning: write posts and add them to a calendar to control the timing and campaigns dedicated to special events on specific platforms;
• posts an “achievements” analysis: get stats on the quantity of new followers, engagement rate, unique reach on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, etc.;
• collaborate with your team: if you work on a team, you will get the necessary elements for building a convenient working environment for team members; sharing the responsibilities will become significantly easier and more effective;
• communicate with your customers: start a conversation with interested customers, reply to their messages, sort them by tags and folders, give your team members the right to take part in specific conversations.

2. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo will lead you through the whole process of promoting on social media. Research, planning, content creation, results analysis; cooperation with influencers will no longer be a tough mission.

• pick up what is trending now and follow the newest ideas: analyze the freshest content on the Internet by different locations and time of release. Build a clear picture of who you can attract and surprise new users with;
• analyze the essentials: get a list of formats your audience might be most satisfied with and find out why your competitors outrun you;
• find your influencers on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, analyze their performance by different metrics; you will have an opportunity to examine the influencers who work with your competitors and identify their strong and weak sides.

3. Social Sprout

Sprout Social will help you organize your working process and make it easier, helping you and your team act in rhythm. 

Sprout Social provides everything a user needs for research, analysis, planning and publishing. You will be able to manage your publications: create drafts, schedule them and add to a corporate calendar, administer several platforms simultaneously and assign specific team members to particular tasks.

Sprout Social creates all the conditions for efficient work with messages. Your team members will be able to hold conversations with customers as soon as a team leader gives permission. You will receive reports on your social media performance.

4. TapInfluence

If you are going to work with influencers, this platform is totally for you. It will help investigate influencers who are popular in your niche by keywords and their performance. Get a full profile on a person you would like to cooperate with: age, gender, location, education, etc. Influencer’s history on social media, his or her insights and revenue you could get after the cooperation – these will be outlined for a user to help choose the best representative for a product. You will find a top-notch influencer for your business.

5. Google Trends

A free SEO tool provided by Google will be helpful if you don’t know what keyword to choose between several variants: it will demonstrate how popular these have been through time. This tool will also show you recently trending keywords, stories and insights.

If there are other tools for social media performance analysis, then why do I need the WebCEO Social Analytics Tools? – you might ask.

First, WebCEO puts everything in one place. This is significantly more comfortable than switching between different types of statistics on different websites and applications.

Second, WebCEO not only shows you statistics, we analyze the statistics for you and determine your weak and strong points.

Third, WebCEO helps you spy on your competitors.

All you need is to create content. WebCEO will care about everything else, for example:

WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring Tool will show your mentions on different blogs, news sections and tweets. You will see the headlines of articles, the time of their publication and a link to a source and its name. Regarding Twitter, you will be provided with the list of tweets you are mentioned in, plus the number of their retweets and likes.

WebCEO’s Social Engagement Tool will tell you everything about your Facebook and Pinterest performance:

• The level of engagement on Facebook with detailed data concerning likes, shares, and comments;
• The total number of Pinterest shares;
• Your competitors’ citations in comparison with yours;
• Your social traffic in terms of the number of sessions, average bounce and conversion rate, the number of completions and their monetary value.

WebCEO’s Facebook Insights Tool takes the data from your Facebook account to present it in the most comfortable way. Using this you will be aware of:

• Your competitors’ Facebook engagement level: reactions, shares, and comments on their Facebook pages by day;
• Your page metrics by chosen periods of time in comparison with previous results: likes, feedback, organic page reach, level of post engagement, and the number of clicks on them;
• Page demographic.

To learn all this data without traveling between websites and tabs, start scanning on WebCEO and we will present you with everything at once.

No need to thank us; we are happy to do this for you!

Make Your Social Media Work for Conversions with WebCEO Sign Up Free

Step #2: What Are the SEO Benefits of Social Media Marketing?

[ Learn what you get when your website performs well on social media ]

Social media has become an essential part of SEO, even if search engines were not measuring likes and shares on various platforms (Google does this). You will help your website grow significantly because your traffic should increase to become 25% of your total traffic if you use social media.  

You will build your reputation. Social media can make you popular as soon as you go there with viral content. Give this a lot of quality, thorough research, and build your material using expert thought processes and real evidence. Write as well as you can and present your work to a relevant audience. A great job will be rewarded and lead to great results.

Why is this worthy of any attention?

If you are respected, you are linked to. Your words, your work and you yourself will have some value in the eyes of your niche audience. And here we smoothly go to the next benefit.

You will get backlinks. Not directly, because of the NoFollow aspect of links posted on social media platforms, but with the help of “mediators”. For example, you will promote your content or its extract on social media platforms. People will go to your website, if you attracted their attention, read your stuff and decide to share it on their websites. As a result, your domain authority will rise. However, always check your backlinks! Toxic or spammy links will cause harm to your website and rankings.

Use WebCEO’s Backlink Quality Check and be aware about the value of the links leading to your website.

IN CONCLUSION, social media platforms are among the most powerful instruments for marketing. The benefits you will get should easily be worthy of all the effort you are going to put in. If you still don’t use social media professionally, it’s high time to start doing this. Begin your journey with WebCEO’s Rank Tracking Tool, identify your competitors and build up a proper marketing strategy for your future success.

The post A Step by Step Guide to Social Media Optimization. Part 3 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Part II: Writing a Post

In the previous part of the article we discussed the following points of social media optimization:

• Research,
• Target audience identification,
• Planning, and
• Social media profile optimization.

In short, that was the preparation stage.

Today in the second part, we will dive into one of the most essential parts of SMO: content creation and optimization.

Social media content isn’t the same as the content you create for websites. On social media platforms, certain rules apply. Length, style and visuals – here are just a few things to double-check and improve. This is where your creativity and passion are put in the spotlight.

It doesn’t matter what type of content you have been producing or are going to produce; social media accepts everything. You can run an educational channel or one for entertainment or news. There is a different strategy for each of these types of channels.

Step #1: How to Make Your Post Visible

[ Find your keywords and optimize your posts properly ]

Optimized social media profiles are undoubtedly important. However, you will never succeed if your posts aren’t seen by social media platform inhabitants. If you want to be noticed, use keywords.

Social media platforms work a bit like Google, exploiting keywords. However, social media’s most important keywords consist of hashtags. They should be relevant to your niche and popular among users:

There is a range of different services which can help you choose relevant and highly demanded hashtags in your niche.

Those are:

• WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool which helps to find the best and most profitable keywords depending on the niche you perform in. It gives you suggestions on what people look for besides your query. You can easily use these substitute queries as hashtags on social media:

Not only will more people find you in searches on the social media platform itself, but Google will often show social media posts in their results if a relevant hashtag is used, like this:

• Keyhole is a good site to gather analytical data on hashtags and track results of a social media hashtag campaign; 
• Flick shows hashtag statistics in terms of general and recent popularity, month and week trends, and will provide you with a list of relevant hashtags and where they are mostly used.

Pick the best keywords with WebCEO's Keyword Research Tool Sign Up Free

Step #2: How to Behave on Different Social Media Platforms

[ Learn how to optimize your social media like a pro and use it to the fullest ]

Social media is the easiest and fastest way to spread any kind of information.

Each social media platform is used by a specific audience. You must be careful because a wrongly prepared post will have weak results. Analyze properly who uses each social media platform in terms of age, location, nationality, etc.

Each platform has its rules and features, so you should follow the game:

X (TWITTER) POSTS

Age group: 25 – 34

Since Twitter sets limit of 280 characters for a single tweet, think wisely about each word you are going to type. Each post should contain a relevant hashtag or two, so the number of characters will be reduced even more.

Surprisingly, too many tweets will actually work against you. Users don’t like their content diluted. Three or four posts per day should be enough.

There are a lot of other useful features on Twitter you can use for your marketing campaign along with hashtags. Look, please, at the screenshot below. There you can see some options to use in order to make a post more engaging:

• Photos and videos: people absolutely fall for various types of content. Make your post entertaining, interesting, and bright! Attach short, yet funny videos or photos for an ordinary follower to watch with pleasure!

Remember to optimize your image size so that those will load faster. Avoid posting photos or videos people are likely to have seen before or, worse, think they have seen before. Snap your own photos before borrowing one from the Internet. Get a photogenic friend or employees to do various things with various tools and emotions so you’ll have a library of compelling shots others have definitely never seen before.

• GIFs: These 1 to 2 second mini-videos are a lot of fun and very popular. Relevant and witty GIFs will make your post attractive and hilarious!
• Polls: people like polls because they like to share their opinions. These are also a great way to check the level of engagement on your Twitter and maybe learn what products people prefer to use in terms of your niche;
• Location: if your business is location-focused, you can add the exact location to a post or mention it in hashtags in order to analyze how much your product is demanded in a specific area:

• Threads: this will definitely come in handy if you want to share a big amount of information on Twitter and don’t want this data to be lost in a long line of replies. You can “attach” tweets to the main post and those will be the first on a queue.

How can Twitter help to increase traffic and extend your audience?

You are likely to benefit from followers’ and hashtag searchers’ actions: likes, retweets, replies, tags, embedded tweets, and other.

Track Twitter mentions of your brand and products with WebCEO Sign Up Free

FACEBOOK POSTS

Age group: 18 – 34

Facebook is one of the most comfortable places to run a business campaign and sell your content. Facebook works well even with local SEO.

Facebook is all about reactions and discussion. It is actually used by all generations since its main goal is communication. Create posts that are highly engaging: ask questions, inspire people to leave their feedback, like, share your posts, or just thank you for great content. As Facebook is created for communication between friends, give followers the opportunity to set a connection with you like with a close buddy.

On Facebook you can use a large set of features to promote your content or products. Let’s learn some more about them:

• Live video: if you a running a presentation open to the public, you will not find a more comfortable way to share it than use social media. This is easy, comfortable, and all encompassing in terms of an audience being able to search for and find you. Insert hashtags to the posts with webinars or live videos, to make finding you easier.
• Photo/video: the classic way of sharing your content. Got anything your audience would love to see? Post photos. Videos are even better.
• Life event: a great feature to bring some attention to your product and your actual location:

In the post itself:

• Feeling/Activity: not a really useful feature for optimization, but it may stir some reaction from followers and make them ask questions, like or comment on your actions:

• Tag people: invite people you want to react to your posts. Naturally, you should avoid tagging random people who have nothing to do with you or your page.
• Polls are similar to those on Twitter where people like to share their opinions.
• Check in: a location feature that specifies where an event/photo/video, etc. takes place, a useful option for location-focused businesses.

Add Facebook Insights data to your marketing mix with WebCEO Sign Up Free

INSTAGRAM POSTS

Age group: 18 – 24

Instagram is now especially favored by people interested in their local environment. The post optimization on this platform is similar to other ones mentioned earlier. Except for:

• There are a set of filters which help users to make their images prettier before publishing, and
• Carousels – a set of several photos or videos within one post.

Instagram allows live videos and STORIES. People like these update features and use them a lot. Follow their example.

Adopt the strategy of posting regular stories. They attract people even more than pictures on profiles! Trends are changing daily, and now people tend to create more stories and make posts only on special occasions. You may use a wide range of possibilities which this way of updating provides you with:

• Location;
• Mentions;
• Hashtags;
• Polls, questions, and quizzes;
• Gifs and stickers;
• Countdown;
• Music, and other.

You can upload a video or an image to your story, even insert links leading to specific websites.

Stories don’t live too long, only for 24 hours. However, if you want them to be permanent and visible on your profile, you can add them to the Story Highlights, where they will live as long as you want them to:

YOUTUBE VIDEOS

Age group: 18 – 75 (18 – 44 make up 90%)

YouTube is you. As long as you are unique, fresh, and entertaining. Nowadays, YouTube is a really powerful platform that embraces almost all the niches in this world. And as there are a lot of representatives of your field, you have to stand out and prove that your content is much better and worthy of being viewed.

The things you can optimize on YouTube:

• Hashtags: these are needed on each platform you are going to use and optimize. Remember, hashtags should be relevant to your niche and topic:

• Video itself: it should be of the highest quality in terms of content presented and resolution. People – your potential customers – prefer enjoying nice pictures, compelling commentary and valuable data, so make sure to meet their requirements. Create playlists by topics and add each new video to the appropriate playlist, so that users may find them quickly:

• Transcript: convert your audio into text. This is very useful for users because some of them may be foreigners, or your speech may be difficult to understand. And this works well for SEO. By doing transcripts for your videos, you help Google crawl and index it. Speak with keywords and then transcribe your words. Help Google show your video as an answer to a searcher’s query.

• Translation: if you own or work for an international company, do not be lazy: translate your video into some of the most widespread languages. A wider audience will have the opportunity to understand you and learn more about your product. This will help you to get the highest search result positions in different locations.

And a live video:

• Basic info: here you are limited to 5000 characters. The description box is really useful, so exploit it undoubtedly! What you can type there:

1. Keywords in title, description itself, and tags:

2. Place links to your website and other social media platforms accounts;

3. Links to materials you used for a video;

4. Notes about important events related to your brand;

5. A brief script of your video with the times you mention certain things – people like this a lot;

YouTube has a lot you can optimize.

Make time to care about each of the underlined points below. These will help you get more value out of using YouTube and feature higher on YouTube search:

People like to leave comments on YouTube, whether they are bad or good ones. Be polite with everybody because it helps to increase the level of engagement and shows that everybody is respected at your place.

Do you know that YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google? According to Global Media Insight, YouTube has more than 2.7 billion active users. If we can’t find what we want on Google, we will jump to YouTube and find it there.

WebCEO understands the importance of YouTube and other platforms in contemporary 2020+ SEO and tries to embrace all the channels you can potentially get some traffic from and optimize your content for. In the WebCEO Rank Tracker Tool, you can easily monitor your YouTube performance with a few clicks, adding it to a list of search engines you can work with. After a fresh scan, you will be able to enjoy a full report regarding your keyword performance on YouTube.

Check your YouTube rankings with WebCEO Sign Up Free

LINKEDIN POSTS

Age group: 18 – 49

LinkedIn is all about being official. Here you present and sell your professionalism. Time to humblebrag and describe why you are a great specialist or why your company is worthy of attention. Don’t be shy!

After filling out the forms regarding your experience and achievements, it will be time to learn how to optimize your posts. If you use a company account, some features of the ordinary posts are not available, for example articles.

Since LinkedIn is more official than other social media platforms you have to present your content thoughtfully. Work on the presentation of your idea a lot, let it be professional, of high quality, and structured so your readers will be compelled to join the conversation and express their opinion regarding a chosen topic. Ask interesting and intriguing questions, challenge readers to take part in your considerations and let them prove whether you are right or wrong. This will bring more engagement. 

You can make your post fully optimized by following the next tips:

• Keywords should be everywhere! Hashtags in your posts make them visible to the users, even if they are not your followers or aren’t connected to you.

• Photos and videos make posts brighter and attract more attention to your content. Be sure to add alt text to your images for better accessibility.

• Articles: this feature lets you share your knowledge with the others and proving that you are indeed a professional in your niche.   

• Share a document: If you have a guide, a PowerPoint presentation or another valuable piece of content, you can easily share it and let the search engines index its content. People will come to you more often knowing you can provide them with well written and useful material. If you don’t want everybody to see and examine your material, you can easily set a limited access to the post;

• Access: in a box under your photo, you have the Access feature. You can decide on who can see the post you are going to publish. If you want to attract as many people as you can, choose “Anyone + Twitter” option, and your post will emerge on your Twitter account as well. 

Make sure you haven’t blocked the comments section and people are able to leave some words regarding your content!

A little BONUS

SlideShare

If you have a lot of in-demand and in-depth content, like presentations, documents, infographics, try SlideShare. It is owned by LinkedIn’s hosting service and is an easy way to spread your content and bring some attention. On SlideShare such features as likes and shares are also available. You can insert links leading to your social media platforms on a SlideShare profile, so people will know where to find you.

PINTEREST PINS

Age group: 18 – 49

Pinterest is all about images. How can this platform be useful for product promotion? All images are supplied with links to their original websites and short descriptions.

Pinterest is a little bit easier than other platforms in terms of content presentation. Let’s dive into it without further ado:

• Images: choose an awesome photo relevant to your business niche, bright and of high quality, and catchy enough for an ordinary user to notice it. Actually, this is the most important part you have to do on Pinterest. Be careful with photos and don’t steal them from other people!
• Title: it’s more than just the name of your image. Write anything you want (relevant to your content of course) to present your image and article to the audience in the most interesting way. The title is also a place for keywords with the help of which people will find your pin.

• Links: there are two places where your links are visible:
  • in the image as you hover a cursor over it, and
  • under the image:

• Description: here you have 500 characters to present your content (be creative!) and interest viewers to learn more. Don’t forget to put keywords in this box.
• Boards are similar to playlists on YouTube with pins replacing videos. This is really useful for followers and beneficial for you because people may observe more of your older pins, which are related to a newer one.

Track Pinterest likes and shares of images on your site with WebCEO Sign Up Free

Step #3: When to Post on Social Media?

[ Choose the right time for your posts ]

Scheduling posts is also an important part of the whole optimization process. A lot of specialists compose their posts in advance, working on each word and preparing respectable material. With a feature for post scheduling, such as on Facebook and YouTube, this process becomes significantly easier.

You can determine the best time for your business to post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms after reading some articles on this topic.

Why don’t we just tell you what are the best times to post?

The audience isn’t the same everywhere. What may be a great time for one type of audience could be the worst variant for another. Everything depends on your products, your target audience, and its location. Time Zones are obviously extremely important for your performance on social media.

How to find the best time periods for posting?

Trial and error.

Do you remember those words about starting your social media optimization long before the specific campaign you are about to run? This time can be devoted to experiments and gathering statistics. This will help you to determine your audience’s “chill out time”: the time when they are best able to soak in your material. You will learn what times during the day are the “busiest” and the “freest”: when readers enjoy your posts to the fullest and when they just miss them. Besides, at the same time, you can track other types of vital statistics: age and location of the readers.

The frequency of posting: specialists have come to the conclusion that it is better to post more than once a day. However, do not create a huge wave of posts; otherwise you will annoy your readers. 3-4 posts per day are enough to stay visible.

Shares also count and should also be optimized. If you repost something, express your opinion. People follow you for your thoughts and ideas, so even when you repost and share others’ material, your added comment should reflect you.

Twitter, of course, is in a league of its own. On this platform, less is more, and people can express their opinion even in three words. However, it’s okay to be more talkative on Twitter if it’s about your industry.

IN CONCLUSION, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and others have become increasingly significant avenues for your content promotion. Experience and hard work matter. If you start a campaign on your own, you will quickly pick up the essentials, improve your skills and work on your social media professionally.

The WebCEO Keyword Research Tool will help you choose the right keywords for your posts and stories so that you will be seen by the right audience!

TO BE CONTINUED…

The post A Step by Step Guide to Social Media Optimization, Part 2 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Part I: Let’s Conduct Some Research

Social media has taken control of our lives. A large number of Internet users nowadays can’t imagine living without chilling out on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Statistics says that:

• Over 62% of the worldwide population use social media;
• The average time for chilling out on social media is about 2:22 hours per day;
• 71% of customers are satisfied with purchasing goods via social media and would recommend a company or a brand to their closest people.

These are the aspects that make social media platforms an extremely profitable field for promoting products, brands, or services.

Using Social media for business these days is indispensable. Even if you already run a successful website on the Internet, you should still raise awareness about your existence on social media platforms. Your activity there greatly affects your site rankings and can often deliver 25% of your overall traffic.

The problem is how to do this properly. How do you optimize your social media and get more revenue?

Social media isn’t about a single funny post on your profile which, you may suppose, will instantly attract an enormous and interested audience for your content. Let’s be honest: it happens, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. Social media business posts will need to be in the hundreds, if not thousands, and the process consists of: work, strategy, and proper organization.

Social media users have become more capricious and used to various types of content presentation. You will have to devote a lot of effort and spend a lot of time to bring something new and amusing to the public, keep your current and future audiences on your side, and leave your competitors far behind.

And we can’t discuss post optimization without mentioning social media optimization in general. Your posts will shine bright only if you prepare a field for them, a place for growing and living. Don’t wait for fruit to sprout without any effort.

There are several steps you will have to take to make your social media accounts relevant, profitable, and popular.

LET’S CONDUCT SOME RESEARCH!

Step #1: What Is Important to Know About Working on Social Media

[ Prepare your team for hard work ]

91% of small businesses use social media to promote their business.

Social media platforms need the kind of attention you will pay to your own website. Experienced social media marketers can name hundreds of reasons why people should use social media for promoting their goods. We are going to save you time and present only the most essential reasons:

1. Nothing will give your brand a more powerful advertisement and a greater boost than social media.

Your brand’s popularity may rise dramatically in a matter of seconds with a proper marketing campaign. It’s a fact that social networks help attract new consumers, increase authority, and bring trust to your goods, brand and company.

2. You will get the opportunity to widen the circle of your customers.

Social media is undergoing constant development. Developers try to make these platforms the most convenient places not only for leisure, but also for business. By drawing people in day and night, many of your targeted followers will be around at any time to see something you post. Your products will be shown directly to this targeted segment of purchasers.

3. Your brand/company will become recognizable due to constant online visibility.

Social media platforms are awesome venues on which to conduct marketing campaigns, because they leave a record. Posts, shares, reposts – everything stays visible on profiles until a user deletes something. It allows people to take a close look at what your company was in the past and is now. Help potential customers learn about you and get a lot of benefit.

4. Managing social media, you will open a communication channel with your audience.

A modern and mobile-friendly website does not always equal a comfortable place for users to be active in the comments section. On the other hand, social media is designed perfectly for this, and that is why people do not hesitate to readily leave their feedback, like your posts and share them. The greatest thing is that you will be alarmed instantly if there are any actions to take and you can reply to them at any moment, even start a conversation in private messages. Followers appreciate it when their opinion is noticed and considered important.

After analyzing the benefits of social media marketing and how crucial it is, IT’S TIME TO GET TO WORK. Maintaining social media accounts is no easy task!

1. Be ready to work hard and spend a lot of time on brainstorming. Your team should always be aware of the latest trends, people’s interests, and know how to present content on any given platform.

2. Before starting the process of optimization, set specific goals to be achieved. This brings extra motivation and lights the path for you to follow and complete the task.

3. Develop a successful social media strategy. At this stage you should analyze and use your competitors!

Identify your rivals with WebCEO’s Rank Tracking Tool. Click on the Dangerous Competitors tab and enjoy the detailed report. Learn who you are going to compete with, who the most alarming ones are, and eventually get the better of them with the next step.

4. Track your competitors’ social media accounts. Here your real journey starts. Study the history of their posts from top to bottom, the level of engagement and what were and are the reasons of their success. An important task in this phase is to go through their feedback and – especially – complaints. Take this into account while developing your own strategy to avoid any mistakes and stand out decently.

5. BEFORE starting your social media campaign, work on your website optimization. Needless to say that SMO (Social Media Optimization) is a great way to promote your business, however, the SMO and SEO cooperation will bring you more value. Through social media, people get acquainted with your products and even purchase them, but your website is the place where they really start trusting you.

Your site architecture, appearance, content, and other components of on and off page SEO matter a lot because first impressions matter. Make your website as attractive as your social media accounts.

Social Media matters. So does SEO. Take care of your site's SEO with WebCEO. Sign Up Free

Step #2: Where to Run Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

[ Identify your target audience and decide on a few social media platforms ]

Before making any attempt to promote a website on social media, you will have to identify your target audience. A target audience comprises the type of people you produce your product for. They are of a specific age, nationality, location, interest, and lifestyle. Your goal is to identify all those points and use them in your campaign.

“My product is for everybody” – if only. Genuinely all-purpose and everyday goods and services are rare. Coca-Cola used to imply it was the case for them, but there are identifiable demographics who drink soda a lot more or a lot less than others. Your product is made for a certain group of people, so your marketing campaign primarily should be based on the needs of this very group.

There are a lot of ways of identifying your target audience. We’ll outline some of them:

• Analyze your current audience. Gather data regarding you current followers and website subscribers. Knowing who is interested in your products at the moment, you can see right from the beginning who are among those you are going to work for in the future. Their interests and hobbies will help you decide on the direction and theme of your campaign. Google Analytics will help a lot with this:  

• Analyze your competitors’ current audiences. Your competitors promote goods that have similarities with yours, so you will have roughly the same circle of customers. Your task is to learn who is interested in their goods and yours besides the group of people you outlined from your current audience.
• Online Polls and Surveys are easy and fast ways to determine who would buy your goods. You can conduct them on your website, some other websites for a fee, and of course on social media platforms with appropriate hashtags.
• Analyze your own product. You should have determined your target audience at the stage of creating your product. Now think about people who may be interested in this besides those you originally considered. Learn who else may get any benefit from your product.
• Create a persona for your target audience: a general portrait of your target audience presented schematically as a person with a set of characteristics. It will be easier to work on your strategy when you have such a useful picture of potential clients. Here is an example:

After identifying your target audience, it’s high time to choose a platform that fits your campaign the most. However, our advice is to USE ALL AVAILABLE PLATFORMS. More likely than not, your customers spend their time on more than just one platform, and so should you.

Step #3: How to Optimize Your Social Media Profiles?

[ Make sure your social media account is ready to be popular ]

Most businesses maintain between 4 and 10 social profiles.

Social media profile creation is not a big deal: the two main components you have to work on are appearance (well-prepared posts) and optimized profiles. But you can’t start your marketing campaign until you have covered the following checklist:

1. Logo and cover image.

The first thing we do as soon as we enter any website is to look at its architecture and appearance. We look for colors and build a certain picture in our minds. Learning the content comes only after.

Optimize your social media profiles to make them easy on people’s eyes – bright and modern. And most importantly, use your own images! Never use stock photos in your profile nor any of your posts. Spend some time to take your own pictures or design your own cartoons, so people will recognize your style everywhere.

2. Business name.

People should know who owns the page, so place your company’s official name for people to know who they have met.

3. Bio or “About” information.

Present information about your company in a short, yet appealing way. List the essential information with your most important keywords and go to the next step.

4. Niche.

On some social media, you can mention the category (niche) your company performs in. If your company is not popular enough yet, don’t miss this part! Even world-renowned companies like Coca-Cola or Starbucks specify their sphere of activity, so why shouldn’t you? Of course, on some platforms, selecting a category is mandatory.

5. Links to a website and other social media platforms.

Always place a link to your website on your social media accounts! All your marketing goals in social media involve people visiting your website (although some businesses only need to have people call their phone number). After all, most of the information about your company and a full list of your products are on your website.

Some platforms allow you to insert links and even have special boxes for them. Use this chance for sure! Everything is for your followers’ convenience.

5. Make it easy to reach you.

Followers and potential customers will appreciate the option to ask a direct question or write some feedback privately. Make it possible and don’t worry about spammers, you can block them if need be.

Moreover, via non-public messages, you can receive a profitable offer from another company, or a good idea from an interested follower. LinkedIn messaging can produce more business for a company than email itself. Always check your social media inboxes.

6. Take your time to prepare.

If you are planning to start a social media marketing campaign in the future, begin the process of optimization at least a few months beforehand. Start making posts, uploading videos and images in order to gather relevant followers and test the waters of audience reaction to your product.

For instance, on Twitter you should have spent a few months following relevant people, unfollowing those who did not follow back and following more relevant people. Be sure to follow/invite those in your database if you have one.

Take a good look at the screenshots below to learn what social media profile optimization entails:

• Facebook:

• Twitter:

• Instagram:

• YouTube:

• LinkedIn:

• Pinterest:

Summary

If you want to join social media and start promoting your business, only wanting is not enough. First and foremost, social media optimization needs YOU: your time, your creativity, your contribution.

You should begin with research and planning. If you want to create a powerful and pleasing place for visitors, you will have to put yourself into data searching and processing. An accurate examination of your business possibilities on social media platforms and your competitors will clear the road to success.  

Proceed with identifying and analyzing your audience. The right people attracted to the right places in the best case scenario will bring you traffic, recognition and customers. When we are talking about Internet use, there are two places where we all party hard most of the time: on websites we like and on social media. Use these two. Become that very liked website lots of traffic after getting loved on social media. These are two components of your strategy.

And finally: optimize your profiles and then go right to the next step: writing a post on social media.

Start your research with the WebCEO Rank Tracking Tool by identifying and analyzing your competitors!

Find your most Dangerous Competitors Sign Up Free

TO BE CONTINUED…

The post A Step by Step Guide to Social Media Optimization. Part 1 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

As experience has shown, video content effectively conveys information to users and is a powerful tool for engaging with the target audience.

Whether it’s educational tutorials, entertaining videos, or product demonstrations, videos can make a lasting impact on viewers and influence their decision-making process.

However, content creators face the challenge of standing out in the sea of video content, surpassing competitors, and reaching the intended audience. So, how can this be achieved? With the assistance of video SEO.

What is Video SEO?

Video Search Engine Optimization, or video SEO, encompasses the intricate art and scientific techniques employed to optimize videos, enhancing their visibility, discoverability, and rankings across search engines and video platforms. 

In a parallel fashion to the traditional SEO practices that propel websites to higher positions in search results, video SEO dedicates its efforts to imbuing videos with enhanced accessibility and allure, captivating human users, and algorithmic mechanisms.

How Does YouTube Rank Videos?

Understanding how Youtube ranks video content is the first step in mastering video SEO. When you learn it, you will be able to optimize your content and augment its visibility on video platforms. Here are key factors which YouTube’s algorithm use to rank your videos:

Relevance to Search Query: To soar in the ranks of YouTube’s search results, create content that resolutely addresses popular search terms, deftly intertwining them with relevant keywords.

Engaging and Valuable Content: You must work on maximizing your watch time by crafting captivating, value-laden content that enchants viewers from start to end, leaving them yearning for more.

Optimized Metadata: Use the proper titling, describing, and tagging, which will boost your content in search results and video recommendations. We will talk about this later.

Audience Interaction: Analyze likes, comments, and shares, which, in turn, serve as eloquent indicators to YouTube that your content strikes a resonant chord with the audience.

Video Optimization Techniques: Create eye-catching thumbnails that accurately represent your video’s content and attract clicks. Incorporate closed captions or subtitles to enhance accessibility and reach a wider audience.

In this article, we will teach you how to optimize your video using these key factors. First, understand and permanently remember them as they are fundamentals.

How to create an effective YouTube Strategy?

Before we talk about optimization, you will need to have a plan and make some preparations. Here are key steps in creating an effective YouTube Strategy:

1. Choose a Target Audience: You’ve heard it many times before, but it hasn’t ceased to be the most crucial step. Recognizing your target audience is paramount for your project. You must clearly understand who these people are, how to capture their interest and motivate them to take action. Devote time to study their interests, preferences, and pain points.
2. Develop a Content Plan: Write a clear content plan and stick to it in a disciplined manner. You should evaluate your resources and determine how much content you can create in a given time. Think about where you’re going to get your video footage from. Analyze your competitors to determine the best video length and development strategy. These are just a few steps in creating a content plan. To learn more about how to do this, check out this video.

3. Set Strategic Goals: Generate goals for yourself and your team. Your goals must be clear and real. Refrain from overloading yourself and feeling bad if you fail on the first try. 

Use these steps to start creating your effective YouTube strategy, and let’s optimize YouTube for search engines. 

Optimizing YouTube for Search Engines

METADATA

Metadata refers to the descriptive information associated with a video, such as the title, description, and tags. 

By optimizing metadata with relevant keywords and compelling descriptions, you can improve the discoverability and visibility of your videos, increase the chances of attracting the right audience, and enhance your overall video SEO performance.

What to do?

1. Find the most relevant keywords with the WebCEO Keyword Research Tool: To get the most relevant keywords for your video metadata, you can use the WebCEO Keyword Research Tool. You will find KEI (keyword effectiveness index), global/local monthly searches, search trends, and bid competition among them.
2. Craft Captivating Titles: Use your title as a tool that grabs viewers’ attention and entices them to watch but do not forget about relevant keywords. Avoid generic titles and be specific to captivate your target audience.
   
   It’s recommended to limit your title to around 60 characters. This way, you can prevent it from getting truncated or cut off on results pages. By optimizing your title length, you can increase the visibility and impact of your video in search engine listings.
3. Enhance Descriptions: By crafting a well-structured and keyword-rich description, you enhance the overall success of your videos, reach a wider audience, and increase the chances of attracting relevant viewers.
   
   A well-optimized video description should be concise, yet informative, clearly summarizing what viewers can expect from your video. It should incorporate relevant keywords naturally, helping search engines understand the context and relevance of your content. By crafting a compelling description, you can capture viewers’ attention and entice them to click on your video.
   
   For example, let’s say you have a cooking channel and created a video about making a delicious chocolate cake. In the video description, add details such as the recipe, ingredients, and any special techniques used.
   
   You can also mention the benefits or unique aspects of your recipe, such as it being gluten-free or vegan-friendly. By optimizing the description with relevant keywords like “chocolate cake recipe” or “easy dessert ideas,” you increase the likelihood of your video being discovered by people searching for those terms.
   
4. Clever Tag Sorcery: Use tags that accurately represent the content of your video and are relevant to your target audience. When choosing tags, you must consider the specific topics, keywords, and themes related to your video. This allows you to reach a wider audience while still targeting viewers interested in your video’s specific niche or topic.
   
   Here are a few examples of effective tags:

• #Cooking Tutorial: This tag indicates that your video provides step-by-step instructions for cooking a particular dish.
• #Healthy Recipes: If your video focuses on nutritious and wholesome recipes, this tag will attract viewers interested in healthy eating.
• #Baking Tips and Tricks: This tag highlights the valuable baking tips and techniques you share in your video.
• #Quick and Easy Meals: If your video showcases recipes that can be prepared quickly, this tag will appeal to busy individuals seeking convenient meal ideas.

Optimizing your video titles, descriptions, and tags is like casting a magical spell to unlock the true potential of your videos. With great content and a touch of humor, you can captivate audiences and make your videos shine.

Thumbnail Optimization

A well-crafted thumbnail can greatly influence click-through rates and other crucial video SEO metrics. 

It’s your chance to make a strong first impression and stand out in search results. A compelling thumbnail should be visually appealing, relevant to your video topic, and instantly grab the viewer’s attention. Consider using images that showcase the essence of your video, whether it’s someone waterskiing, a delectable dish, or an intriguing scene. 

What to do?

1. Aim for a resolution of 1280×720 pixels to ensure optimal display on various devices. Secondly, use high-quality images that are clear, vibrant, and visually appealing. 
2. Remember three key attributes: clarity, relevance, and visual appeal. Clarity ensures that your thumbnail conveys the essence of your video at a glance. Relevance aligns it with the viewer’s interests, drawing them to explore further. Visual appeal is the secret ingredient that sparks their curiosity, making your thumbnail irresistibly clickable.
3. Consider featuring a close-up of a person’s face or an engaging scene representing your video’s essence. Additionally, include relevant text or graphics that provide context and entice viewers to click. Remember, a well-optimized thumbnail should be visually striking, relevant to your video’s content, and designed to catch the viewer’s attention among other search results and recommended videos.

Transcriptions and Closed Captions

Providing transcriptions and closed captions for your videos is like opening doors to inclusivity and accessibility. These textual accompaniments allow individuals with hearing impairments or language barriers to fully perceive your content, ensuring no one is left behind.

In addition to accessibility, transcriptions and closed captions enhance the overall user experience. 

They enable viewers to follow dialogues, catch missed words, and clarify complex details. 

Moreover, by including relevant keywords and contextual information in the transcription and captions, you will improve the visibility of your video, making it more understandable to search engines.

What to do?

YouTube offers a built-in subtitle feature that allows you to upload or create subtitles directly on the platform. You can use their automatic captioning feature or manually add and edit subtitles.

Video Sitemaps and Schema Markup

A video sitemap is a sitemap with additional information about videos hosted on your pages. Creating a video sitemap is an excellent way to help Google find and understand the video content on your site, especially content that was recently added or that they might not otherwise discover with their usual crawling mechanisms. 

Examples of Video Sitemaps

By providing structured data, you allow search engines to understand the essence of your video content, improving their perception and ensuring accurate indexing.

Including schema markup provides search engines with additional context and information about your videos.

What to do?

Begin by structuring your video sitemap in a format that search engines can easily comprehend. Ensure the sitemap is up-to-date and accurately represents your video library.

Once your video sitemap is ready, it’s time to submit it to search engines. To submit your sitemap, use the respective webmaster tools provided by search engines, such as Google Search Console.

Finally, explore the extensive schemas available at schema.org, selecting the appropriate schema that aligns with your video content.

User Engagement and Social Sharing

User engagement signals are the lifeblood of video SEO. Likes, comments, shares, and subscriptions breathe life into your videos, creating a vibrant community of viewers who eagerly embrace your content. Search engines take notice of these signals, using them as a compass to gauge the popularity and relevance of your videos. The higher the engagement, the greater the impact on video visibility and rankings.

What to do?

1. Interact with comments, encourage sharing thoughts & ideas, and show interest in feedback to build a community around your videos.
2. Create engaging videos that inspire and compel viewers to share. Use informative, entertaining, or emotional content, and captivate your audience with storytelling techniques. Leave them with a desire to spread the word and amplify the reach and impact of your videos.
3. Collaborate with other content creators and influencers in your niche. Create joint videos, cross-promote on social media, and leverage each other’s audiences to expand the reach and benefit all parties involved.

As you set your sights on video success, remember that user engagement and social sharing are the catalysts that propel your videos to new heights.

CONCLUSION

Video SEO is a crucial aspect of digital marketing, allowing businesses and content creators to optimize their videos for search engines and video platforms. By understanding the key factors that influence video rankings on platforms like YouTube, such as relevance to search queries and engaging content, you can increase visibility and attract the right audience. Additionally, optimizing video metadata, including titles, descriptions, and tags, enhances discoverability and improves search engine indexing.

Analyzing video performance metrics helps you gauge the effectiveness of your videos and make informed decisions for continuous improvement. By embracing these strategies, you can unlock the full potential of your videos and captivate audiences in the digital realm.

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The post Video SEO: How to Make YouTube Rankings High? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

So you’re ready to migrate your website? It’s like moving to a new house – exciting but also a bit nerve-wracking. You may have high hopes about the potential benefits, but you feel uneasy about the possible negative consequences, such as a traffic loss or a hit to your SEO rankings.

Well, fear not! Website migration doesn’t have to be a scary process with careful planning and our guide.

In this article, we’ll guide you through everything you need to know about website migration, from when and why to migrate, to how to do it effectively and avoid critical mistakes. Whether you’re moving to a new domain, updating your website’s technology, or simply switching hosting providers, we’ve got you covered.

So please take a deep breath, grab a cup of coffee, and let’s dive into the exciting world of website migration!

What is Website Migration?

Website migration refers to moving a website from one location to another when you need to change the domain name, switch to a new hosting provider, or update the site’s technology or design. 

This process can involve transferring files, databases, and other elements that make up the website and setting up redirects to ensure visitors and search engines can find the new site. 

Website migration aims to improve the site’s performance, functionality, or user experience. Still, it is a complex process that requires careful planning and execution to ensure a smooth transition from the old site to the new one. A poorly executed migration can lead to traffic loss, diminished search engine rankings, and a negative impact on the user experience. 

However, when done correctly, website migration can provide numerous benefits and opportunities for growth. 

Let’s explore what type of website migration we can deal with depending on the reasons for the move and the scope of the changes.

Types of the website migration

1. Domain name change: This migration occurs when you change your website’s domain name to rebrand your business, improve your domain authority, or target a different audience. 

2. Hosting provider switch: You can use this type when you swap hosting providers to improve your site’s uptime, performance, security, and reduce costs.
   
3. CMS platform change: This type of migration occurs when you switch your website’s content management system (CMS) to a different platform, either to gain more features, better customization, or easier maintenance.
   
4. Website redesign: You can use it when you decide to redesign your website’s look and feel, either to update its visual appeal, improve user experience, or align it with your branding strategy.
   
5. HTTPS migration: This type is helpful when you switch your website from HTTP to HTTPS to improve security, comply with regulations, or enhance trust with your visitors. 

Preparing for Website Migration

Before you begin any website migration, it’s crucial to make a backup of your current site. Ensure you have a copy of your site’s files and database, which you can use to restore your site if something goes wrong during the migration process.

Many people overlook this step, which can lead to disastrous consequences. It’s common for site owners to forget to back up their site, assuming that the migration process will be straightforward and without issues. However, this is not always the case, and a backup can be a lifesaver in such situations.

To make a backup, you can use various tools and services, including hosting providers, website builders, and backup plugins. Depending on your website’s platform and complexity, you may need different methods or tools to create a full backup.

Determining what to migrate and what not to migrate

After you double-check your backup and recheck it again, you’ll want to determine what to migrate and what not to migrate. This step is critical to ensure you don’t accidentally leave out any essential site elements or migrate unnecessary ones.

To determine what to migrate, you can start by reviewing your site’s content, features, and functionality. Ask yourself what is essential for your site’s success and what can be left behind. Consider your site’s performance and user experience and see if any elements can be optimized or improved during migration.

Here are some examples of what you might want to include in your migration:

• Content: All of your site’s pages, posts, images, videos, and other media.
• Design: Any design elements, such as logos, images, and stylesheets.
• Functionality: Any custom functionality or plugins essential to your site’s operation.
• User data: If you have user accounts or other data stored on your site, you should also migrate this data to the new site.
  

On the other hand, here are some examples of what you might not want to migrate:

• Outdated or irrelevant content: If your site has old or outdated content that no longer serves a purpose, it may be best to leave it behind.
• Unused plugins or themes: If you have plugins or themes installed on your site that you no longer use or need, do not migrate them to reduce the site’s size and complexity.
• Deprecated functionality: Do not migrate your deprecated or unsupported functionality to avoid compatibility issues with the new site.
  

Additionally, checking if your old site has any SEO problems before migration is essential. One way to do this is by using the WebCEO Site Audit Tool, which can scan your site and identify any issues that may impact your search engine rankings. Addressing these issues before migration ensures that your new site starts with a strong SEO foundation.

Creating a migration plan

Creating a migration plan helps you stay organized and focused, minimizes downtime, and reduces the risk of losing data.

To create a migration plan, start by outlining the steps to complete the migration successfully. Your plan should include the following elements:

1. Timeline: Determine the date you want to migrate your site and establish deadlines for each step in the process. Be realistic and allow enough time for unexpected issues that may arise.
2. Resources: Identify the resources needed to complete the migration, including personnel, tools, and services. Ensure that you have everything you need before you start the migration process.
3. Communication: Notify your users, customers, and stakeholders of the upcoming migration and inform them about what to expect during the process. Keep them updated on the progress of the migration and notify them when it’s complete.
4. Testing: Before launching your new site, conduct thorough testing to ensure everything functions correctly. Test all functionality, including forms, links, and user accounts.
5. Rollback Plan: Have a contingency plan (backup) if something goes wrong during the migration. Your rollback plan should include the necessary steps to revert to the old site.

Implementing the Website Migration

Once you’ve completed your planning, it’s time to shine and manage the migration. Here are some general steps you can follow:

Step 1: Set up the new site with the appropriate platform, hosting provider, and domain name. Install any necessary plugins or themes and ensure the site is functional and optimized for search engines.

• Choose a reliable hosting provider with good customer support and the necessary resources for your site’s needs.
• Select a platform that fits your needs, whether WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or another CMS.
• Ensure your site is optimized for search engines using appropriate metadata, keyword-rich content, and fast page load speeds.
• Use a responsive design that works well on all devices.
  

Step 2: Move your site’s files to the new site, including your database and other media files. Depending on your platform and hosting provider, you may need to use FTP or a file manager to transfer the files.

• Make a backup of your site before transferring any files.
• Follow the instructions provided by your hosting provider or platform to transfer your site’s files.
• Test the new site’s functionality after the transfer to ensure everything works correctly.
  

Step 3: Set up redirects to the new site to ensure visitors and search engines can find your new site. Use 301 redirects to redirect all traffic from the old site to the corresponding pages on the new site.

• Create a list of all URLs on the old site and their corresponding URLs on the new site.
• Set up 301 redirects using a plugin or your hosting provider’s control panel.
• Test the redirects to ensure they are working correctly.
  

Step 4: Test the new site thoroughly to ensure everything works correctly, including all links, images, and other media files. Check optimization for search engines and that all pages load quickly and without errors.

• Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to check your site’s loading speed and identify areas for improvement.
• Test all forms and interactive elements to ensure they are functioning correctly.
  

Step 5: Update your DNS settings to point to the new site. This step may take some time to propagate, so be patient and monitor the site carefully during this period.

• Follow the instructions provided by your domain registrar to update your DNS settings.
• Monitor the site closely during migration to ensure everything works correctly.

Step 6: Monitor your traffic and search engine rankings closely after the migration. Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track your site’s performance and identify any issues that may arise. 

• Use WebCEO’s Rank Tracker Tool to Track All Types of Google Results, including SERP Features. Connect your site with Google Search Console.
• Monitor your site’s performance for several weeks after the migration to ensure everything is okay.
• Use the data provided by the WebCEO tools and Google Search Console to identify any issues and improve your site’s optimization and user experience.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, website migration is a complex process that requires careful planning and execution to avoid potential negative consequences like a loss of traffic and a hit to SEO rankings. However, with proper preparation and a well-executed plan, website migration can provide many benefits and opportunities for growth, such as improved performance, functionality, user experience, and security.

It’s essential to determine what to migrate and what not to migrate, double-check your backup, and create a detailed migration plan with clear timelines and resources. 

Using WebCEO Tools to fix any SEO issues before migration is essential to ensure a strong foundation for your new site.

By following the steps outlined in this article and seeking professional help when needed, you can successfully migrate your website and enjoy the benefits of a fresh start while minimizing any potential negative impact.

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The post How to Avoid SEO Disasters During Website Migration appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Ready to turbocharge your content creation? Discover the power of ChatGPT, the innovative AI technology that’s changing the game right now. Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is a language model that can generate human-like text at lightning speed as a result of dialogue with the user.

But what exactly is ChatGPT, and what magic can it do? 

In this article, we’ll take an in-depth look at this cutting-edge technology and see how it can boost your content creation to a new level. From exploring the ins and outs to seeing real-life examples of its impact, you’ll master this AI-powered tool that might become an integral part of your workflow.

What is ChatGPT, and How is it Revolutionizing the World of SEO?

ChatGPT processes and creates content based on over 570GB of text data using deep learning algorithms. In addition, AI technology can understand and respond to various inputs, making it a unique tool for different cases.

The popularity of ChatGPT speaks for itself. The tool attracted over 1,000,000 users in the first five days after release. In comparison, Netflix achieved the same numbers in 3,5 years, Facebook in 10 months, Spotify in 5 months, and Instagram in 2,5 months. 

Considering this remarkable success, it’s clear that ChatGPT is a tool that is worth a try.

WARNING! ChatGPT undoubtedly assists with content creation, but it is not a miracle solution that immediately brings a lot of profit.

To benefit from this tool, you need to master the skill of prompt building and gain experience. The effectiveness of ChatGPT is directly proportional to a user’s skills, and those who will catch the wave will create high-quality content faster and more effectively than ever before.

Moreover, ChatGPT can generate content in multiple languages, making it a valuable tool for globally-operating companies.

What Can You Do With ChatGPT?

In addition to writing essays, imaginative tales, and poems, ChatGPT assists you in conducting marketing analysis and offers a sturdy foundation for audience research upon which your strategy will be established.

By aggregating and analyzing tons of information, ChatGPT saves your time and energy in generating content.

All these attributes will aid you in making more intelligent, bold, and effective decisions regarding your audience wants and needs.

Beyond crafting content, ChatGPT creates meta descriptions for your web pages and troubleshoots code. Using it for coding requires a time-consuming technical procedure, but as the AI model expands, this process will likely become much more manageable.

ChatGPT can also serve as a research aide, presenting answers in clear and short formats, saving users the hassle of navigating numerous web pages in search of answers to their questions.

Let’s look at an example!

You’re looking for instructions on how to tie a tie. Rather than researching all kinds of tie-making and reading long-block posts about the types of men who like ties and why, ChatGPT gives you simple and short step-by-step instructions.

Using ChatGPT in balance with human creativity and data-driven technology, you can optimize your marketing efforts and create a better brand, product, and experience for your audience.

Some users fear the technology’s capabilities, but some embrace its potential with open arms. It’s a good move.

We belong to the group that sees the ChatGPT potential and its ability to deal with SEO efforts. Let us demonstrate and explain how ChatGPT can improve your search engine optimization strategies and automate your marketing workflow.

ChatGPT and SEO: The Perfect Partnership for Better Results

We have prepared a lot of examples of how to use ChatGPT for SEO and are ready to share them with you! Before we begin, I want to leave a little hint. 

Install a special extension for ChatGPT – AIPRM for ChatGPT. 

The Google Chrome extension allows you to use the public prompts and take ChatGPT to the next level.

1. Find The Best Themes for Your Niche Articles

Let’s pretend we have a Lifestyle website and want to write a travel article. What topics can ChatGPT offer us? 

Perfect.

I pick “Solo travel: tips and experiences.” Now we can use the WebCEO Keyword Research tool to find good keywords to rank for. Find at least ten keywords.

My keywords:

1. Solo travel
2. Travel alone
3. Solo trip
4. Solo travel tips
5. Solo Travel experience
6. Why Solo Travel is the best
7. Travel Alone Tips
8. What to do when traveling alone
9. Safety tips for traveling alone
10. How to travel alone

2. Build Click Baiting and Engaging Titles

We need a catchy and creative title based on our keywords. Let’s add them and accept the result.

Nicely done. I like “Solo Travel Tips: How to Plan, Pack and Stay Safe.” 

3. Create Compelling Meta Descriptions in a Flash

Creating a meta description may be a time-consuming task for a copywriter. The challenge lies in adding keywords while adhering to the character limit. However, by putting these requirements into ChatGPT, the outcome will manifest immediately.

4. Craft an Effective Article Structure

In addition to creating a structure for your article, ChatGPT can tell you what you need to write about.

I think you’re left in no doubt about how much time you’ve saved:)

5. Maximize the Impact of Your Writing

Of course, you can ask ChatGPT to write the text for each heading in your article, but Google does not welcome AI-generated content and regards it as spam. After a helpful content update, Google may have enhanced its algorithms to identify AI content, and with the emergence of ChatGPT, their work in this direction will only improve. 

But, ChatGPT can still help you refine your article’s quality and guide you toward potential topics to cover. Moreover, you can use ChatGPT to produce content for social media posts, email pitches, landing pages, or even ad copy while also utilizing it as a brainstorming tool.

Let’s create a text on one of the suggested blocks and test it with an AI Detector. 

As you can see, I made a detailed prompt to get the best result, but the AI Detector showed that this text was 100% created by AI.

But agree, if we could merely copy and paste the content AI creates and get a profit, then everyone would aspire to work in SEO. Again, ChatGPT is not a magic solution; rather, it’s a tool that can aid you in performing routine tasks and junior jobs, and it always needs human adjustments. 

6. Make Your Content More Engaging and Creative

ChatGPT can easily improve any written text, transforming your ideas into clear, concise, and creative pieces. Let’s give it a small snippet of text about travel solo and ask it to provide a few options for the introduction. 

With the right combination of creativity and skill, you can catch your audience from the very first words and leave them eagerly anticipating what’s next.

7. Streamline Your FAQs with Content-Based Generation

FAQs clarify common questions and concerns related to a topic. By answering frequently asked questions, you can help people understand the topic more clearly, leading to better engagement and more informed decision-making.

8. Use Statistics and Facts to Strengthen Your Content

Using facts and stats to strengthen your content is an effective way to shout your message clearly, build credibility and authority, and establish yourself as an expert in your niche. 

By providing solid evidence to support your claims, you demonstrate that your ideas are well-researched, accurate, and trustworthy. 

Statistics and facts can also make your content more memorable, as people remember numerical data more easily than abstract concepts.

9. Categorize Keywords by Search Intent

We previously examined how we could use ChatGPT to generate content. Now, I will demonstrate how you can promptly assign keywords by search intent with ChatGPT, whether they are commercial, transactional, or informational.

Let’s add ten more keywords and request to distribute them accordingly.

We see that ChatGPT not only distributed our keywords based on search intent but also explained the reasons for classification.

10. Translate Keywords for Global Business

In today’s global marketplace, where people are constantly searching for products and services online, translating keywords is an essential step towards reaching new audiences and growing your business. 

By translating keywords into various languages, you can improve your search engine optimization and increase your website’s visibility to international audiences. It allows you to understand how people in other cultures search for products or services related to your business. 

11. Generate .htacess Rewrite Rules with Ease

SEO specialists often use redirects, but searching for the appropriate code can be time-consuming. Instead, we can request ready-made code from ChatGPT to save time and effort.

12. Optimize Your Robots.txt for Search Engines

In the same way as with .htaccess, we can make a request to create a condition in robots.txt.

13. Identify Relevant and Popular Sites In Your Niche

Connecting with high-impact websites can significantly improve your brand’s visibility and online authority while also driving traffic and securing high-quality backlinks.

14. Rewrite Outreach Emails to Increase Response Rates

Outreach emails are an important tool for improving a website’s search engine optimization because they can help build backlinks, which are one of the key factors in determining a website’s authority and ranking.

Additionally, outreach emails can also help establish relationships with other website owners and potentially lead to future collaborations and partnerships. Of course, we can use ChatGPT to create emails in a strategic and personalized manner.

ChatGPT and Business: Practical Applications and Benefits

Undoubtedly, ChatGPT is unique. It presents exciting possibilities for e-marketing, enabling personalized engagement with customers and optimizing business workflows.

Whether social media marketing, lead generation, HR processes, reputation management, or any other aspect of business, ChatGPT can help to improve customer service, enhance your online presence, and increase your profit. If. You. Will. Master. It.

So, let’s do it and explore the exciting possibilities of ChatGPT and discover even more opportunities that can take your e-marketing strategy to the next level! And who knows, maybe ChatGPT will even become your new favorite co-worker – after all, it’s always online and ready to help!

1. Website Content: Descriptions of Goods and Services

You can use ChatGPT to generate product descriptions. If you work hard and develop a good prompt, the neural network will generate some pretty texts. But they may still need a proofreader to translate the ‘AI text’ into ‘human text’.

Great, but I would remove the last sentence. 

2. Ideas for Local Business Solutions

You already know how ChatGPT can generate ideas for your articles quickly and efficiently. However, we haven’t mentioned that it can give you ideas for local businesses. Here we go!

3. Naming for Your Business, Blog, and Personal Brand

Naming your brand is a crucial decision you’ll make because it’s the first thing people notice and remember about your company.

But how do you find the right name that captures the spirit of your brand and connects with your audience?

That’s where ChatGPT comes in! You can easily generate unique and creative names for your café, YouTube channel, personal profile, book, or app. All you have to do is provide a detailed description of what you want your name to represent.

Now we have a name for our Gothic-style Italian food restaurant in two languages. My favorite is Blood of Rome.

4. Slogan generation

If you’ve been working in advertising for years, you know how important it is to have a memorable and attention-grabbing slogan that captures your audience’s attention. A good slogan can make or break your business, so it’s not something you want to leave to chance.

With ChatGPT’s help, you can set the tone and message, specify the word count, and even the emotions you want to evoke.

“Upgrade your setup, upgrade your life” got me right in the heart!

5. Marketing Strategy for Social Media

ChatGPT can develop ideas for your social media promotion, even if you have the most rambling and complicated niche. 

I’ll allow myself a bit of creativity and come up with a niche out of the air. For example, “Sports suits, with different colors of trousers and sweatshirt with Top-1 Ranked print on the back.”

6. Code Development for WordPress

You can use ChatGPT to write simple code for a WordPress site. However, technical knowledge is still required to implement and understand it. To obtain the code, create an appropriate prompt. For example:

Can you help me generate code for a custom WordPress plugin?

WARNING! ChatGPT is not an ideal tool for writing code as the neural network may produce incorrect responses.

We advise testing codes with a technical expert, or you can also point out to ChatGPT that the code is not working, and it will explain what is wrong. But all in all, it’s a good idea to simplify code development and learn (if you are new to IT or looking for a fast solution).

7. Code Errors Fixing

While not perfect, neural networks can be utilized by novice programmers to perform basic error checking in code. Research has demonstrated that they are not flawless and may not identify all errors. However, ChatGPT can still be an effective tool for fixing as it can provide troubleshooting steps.

8. Essays and Articles

You can use ChatGPT to develop your essay and get some inspiration. 

In addition, you can take part of your article and ask ChatGPT to rewrite the text. By combining your own writing with suggestions from the AI, you can create a well-crafted paragraph. 

Let’s take part of my text from this article and ask ChatGPT to rewrite it a bit.

Now we have a lot of options. We can change the whole paragraph, look for some synonyms or add more information. It’s up to you!

9. Fairy Tales and Children’s Stories

You can make ChatGPT your ghostwriter and produce tales or stories for children. It’s a ready-made business idea, but don’t thank me too quickly. 

You will still have to think about the details and beautiful plot twists to get really good results. However, even with a minimal prompt, you can get a great story to tell a child.

You must check out this heartbreaking story about princess Amara and Jack!

10. Mindblow Social Media Content in Seconds

I envy SMM specialists because texts for social networks don’t need to be unique and won’t be penalized for using artificial intelligence. No further explanation is necessary – just take a look at the social media posts that can be created in seconds!

Fantastic! Informative and useful content for such a simple prompt. Imagine the potential if you masterfully understand how it works. Everyone who creates social media content should try to work with ChatGPT.

11. Music Creation

As a music writing enthusiast, I’m just thrilled with what ChatGPT has to offer. It can not only write lyrics for a song but even suggest chord progressions that perfectly match the emotions you’re trying to convey.

With ChatGPT’s cutting-edge technology at your fingertips, you can create songs that truly wow your audience.

An Honest Look at ChatGPT Limitations

We’ve discovered that ChatGPT offers opportunities for SEO, marketing, writing, music, and many other businesses. However, like any technology, ChatGPT has its limitations. Let’s explore them! 

ChatGPT Limitation 1: Inability to Recognize Context

While ChatGPT is a powerful language model with the ability to answer a wide range of questions, its limitations in recognizing context can lead to inaccuracies, irrelevance, or even potential harm. Here are three examples of my ChatGPT questions where it does not understand the context.

Example 1: What is the best time to visit Paris?

ChatGPT provided an answer based on the time of the year or local festivals without considering other factors, such as pandemics, political unrest, or other events that may be happening in the city. In such cases, the answer provided by ChatGPT may not be the most accurate or relevant.

Example 2: Advice on a gift for a friend

Not bad, we got tips that may help to find a gift for a friend, but ChatGPT is not able to take into account your friend’s unique preferences or interests, which can lead to responses that are not relevant or useful.

Example 3: Provide your recommendations on a good movie to watch

ChatGPT provided suggestions based on the movie’s genre or ratings without considering personal preferences or interests.

Summary

In situations where context is important, such as in Example 1, where the current health state or political situation may affect the best time to visit a city, ChatGPT’s response may not be the most accurate or relevant. 

Similarly, in Examples 2 and 3, ChatGPT’s responses do not consider the preferences or interests of the individual, resulting in potentially unhelpful recommendations. It is important to keep these limitations in mind when using ChatGPT and to take its responses with a grain of salt.

ChatGPT Limitation 2: Biased Responses

A common cause of bias in ChatGPT is his training data. The model learns from vast amounts of text data, meaning ChatGPT is good as the data it has access to. Unfortunately, text data is often riddled with biases and prejudices, which can then be internalized by ChatGPT.

For example, if the training data contains a disproportionate amount of negative sentiment towards a particular culture or community, ChatGPT may also learn to associate negative attributes with that culture or community.

Naturally, we cannot take ChatGPT’s answer as truth, as attitudes and interpretations of religion or culture can change due to many factors.

ChatGPT Limitation 3: Lack of Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, understand, and control your own emotions, as well as the emotions of others. Fortunately or not, ChatGPT lacks the emotional capacity of a human being, and therefore, it may not always provide the appropriate emotional support or understanding that a person may need.

I know you will find this interesting to provoke ChatGPT emotions;)

Hey, ChatGPT, I have a new slogan for you. “No emotions, just instructions”

At least it knows how to be polite.

ChatGPT Limitation 4: Dependence on Data

One of the most significant limitations of ChatGPT is its dependence on data. It was trained on a massive dataset, which was compiled from various sources up until 2021. 

Therefore, the model’s knowledge and responses are limited to the data that it has been trained on, and it may not be up to date with the latest information or trends.

ChatGPT Limitation 5: Inability to Learn from Feedback

ChatGPT does not have the ability to adapt its responses based on feedback or new information that it receives during a conversation. It is because ChatGPT is a pre-trained model that has already learned patterns in language based on a large dataset, and generates responses based on those patterns.

For example, if someone corrects ChatGPT’s response, it would not automatically incorporate that correction into its knowledge base or change its future responses based on that feedback.

This lack of adaptability can sometimes result in repetitive, unhelpful, or even offensive responses. 

However, some models are designed to incorporate feedback and improve their responses over time, so not all language models have the same limitations as ChatGPT.

ChatGPT Limitation 6: Limited Language Proficiency 

ChatGPT may not fully understand or express the nuances of human language, particularly when it comes to more subtle aspects of language such as tone, humor, or sarcasm.

ChatGPT can recognize patterns and structures in language to generate responses. However, it may not always understand the full context of a conversation, which can lead to misunderstandings or responses that are not quite on target.

For example, ChatGPT may struggle with understanding idiomatic expressions or regional dialects that are not present in its training data. It also has problems recognizing when a statement is sarcastic or humorous since these aspects of language often rely on contextual cues and knowledge of social norms. 

How to prepare for a rainy day?
*for a rainy day is one of the most famous English idiomatic expressions which means “a time in the future when something will be needed.”

Here I want advice and tips on how to prepare for a time in the future when something will be needed, but ChatGPT gives me instructions on how to prepare for a day with bad weather.

ChatGPT Limitations Summary

While ChatGPT has numerous benefits for various industries, it also has several limitations that users should be aware of. 

These limitations include the inability to recognize context, potential biases in responses, lack of emotional intelligence, dependence on data, inability to learn from feedback, and limited language proficiency. 

You should keep them in mind and use ChatGPT’s responses with caution, recognizing that they may not always be accurate, relevant, or appropriate. It is important to understand that while ChatGPT is a powerful tool, it still has a long way to go in terms of replicating human-level language understanding and emotional intelligence.

WebCEO Tools and ChatGPT: The Ultimate SEO Power Duo

WebCEO and ChatGPT are powerful tools that can work wonders for your digital presence. By leveraging their cutting-edge capabilities, businesses, and digital marketers can improve their website accessibility, automate SEO tasks, and enhance their social media presence.

Note! These tools do not directly generate profits, but you will achieve long-term growth and success by combining them. For example:

1. Conduct keyword research: Use the WebCEO Keyword Research Tool to identify high-value keywords and topics related to your business. Then, use ChatGPT to generate content ideas based on those keywords and topics.
2. Optimize your content: Use the WebCEO On-Page Optimization Tool to ensure that your content is properly optimized for search engines after you’ve generated SEO-friendly and engaging content for your audience with ChatGPT.
3. Monitor your backlinks: Use the WebCEO Backlink Analysis Tool to monitor your backlink profile and identify any potentially harmful links. You can then use ChatGPT to generate outreach messages to other websites, asking them to link to your content and improve your backlink profile.
4. Analyze your competitors: Use the WebCEO Competitor Analysis Tool to identify your main competitors and their SEO strategies. Then, utilize ChatGPT to generate ideas for improving your SEO strategy and outpacing your competitors.

By using WebCEO and ChatGPT together, you can improve your website’s SEO, attract more traffic, and ultimately increase your profits. 

SEO is long-term work, and results may not be immediate. It’s crucial to be patient and persistent in your SEO efforts and continue to monitor and adjust your strategy as needed.

CONCLUSION

Well, we have explored the potential of ChatGPT and seen many examples of responses for marketing, SEO, social media, and other businesses. We can say with confidence that one of the most exciting aspects of ChatGPT is its potential for content creation. 

Unlock the ability to rapidly produce articles, blog posts, product descriptions, or even FAQ pages with just a few prompts. That’s exactly what ChatGPT can do, and its ability to optimize content for search engines is a crucial advantage for businesses that are looking to improve their online visibility.

I understand your concern – how could artificial intelligence ever replace human creativity and nuance in writing? The truth is, it probably never will. 

ChatGPT can generate high-quality content, but it still lacks the personal touch and creativity that only human writers can provide. However, ChatGPT can be a game-changer for companies looking to quickly and efficiently generate large amounts of content.

To use ChatGPT effectively, it is essential to master prompt building, gain experience with the tool, and keep its limitations in mind. Through experimentation and practice, users can improve their productivity and create more engaging content for their audience. Remember, it is crucial to be clear, concise, and accurate to get the best results!

Also, in a wave of mass layoffs, ChatGPT can be a great tool for freelancing. 

We recommend exploring the potential of ChatGPT for your content creation needs, experimenting with different prompts, and combining ChatGPT with WebCEO tools to optimize your website’s SEO.

Combine WebCEO Tools and ChatGPT for More Profit Sign Up Free

The question that looms is whether this article itself is a laborious and meticulous creation or merely a skillfully composed prompt?

The post The Ultimate Guide to Mastering ChatGPT for Effective E-Marketing and SEO appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

“You need backlinks and organic visitors searching for the answers, products, and services you provide. Guest blogging is the best way to do all that…” © Neil Patel.

Each SEO professional knows or should know that the hardest and the greatest part of the SEO process is to create decent content. No SEO tool will help here. Content will lead you through all SERP positions and become a business card of your website. However, you can’t get the highest positions immediately, because people don’t know about you at the beginning. In addition, your competitors already have their places and will not give you a crown for no reason at all. So, how do you make a website visible on the Internet and stand out in the crowd?

The answer is pretty simple and, at the same time, difficult enough: attract more people and increase traffic.

How can you do this? Create content of high quality and in detail. This will definitely attract visitors to your place.

Look at Google. Even though we are angry because of all those Algorithms, penalties, and rank drops, at the same time we are always ready to admit that Google seeks to algorithmically present its idea of quality and tries to give this quality to the users. This has brought Google a lot of customers.

How can other websites make their field of customers big enough and show that they have needed quality? What do webmasters try to do besides keyword research in order to get the highest positions on the SERPs? The most common answer: they do link building. It is hard but future success requires this.

And guest blogging for a long time has been one of those ideas which come to mind almost immediately when we talk about backlinks. Today we are going to focus on this.

Table of Contents

1. Get Started with Guest Blogging
2. Pros of Guest Blogging
3. Cons of Guest Blogging
4. How to Identify Your Target Audience
5. Where to Publish Guest Posts
6. How to Introduce Yourself for Guest Posting
7. How to Promote Your Guest Posts

Guest blogging is a great opportunity to show the audience of a well trafficked site with a high domain authority that you are worth their attention and they can bravely come to your website. People trust websites that are already quite authoritative and sometimes don’t want to miss any material they present. From those interested people you can get more traffic: they may share your post, advise their friends, and they may also come to your website looking for more good material. If they are satisfied with the stuff you provide, you can wait for backlinks, because great content is always worth sharing.

Here we encounter the quality content problem. Guest blogging is not just about interesting things you want to share with others; this is your business card for potential visitors. You should use all your talent and power and conduct a lot of research on a chosen topic to prove that you are competent enough for people to want to visit your site.

However, you should think carefully about guest blogging. As well as any other strategy this one has its pros and cons, and we definitely should consider them in detail.

We have chosen to sort out a huge amount of advantages and make a simple and short list for you with little descriptions.

1. Website Popularity

By posting on another website with a large audience with a well done article, you can extend the borders of your own site’s popularity, which means:

• A lot of traffic comes to your place with people who have read your words, liked them, and decided to explore more material you offer. They may come and go or stay for a little longer, sharing your content and linking to you, which is really great for your rankings;
• You can welcome a bunch of new interests and goals at your place. Such people are a breath of fresh air: they may enter your website and a bit later become your permanent subscribers who wait for new content from you or even offer some interesting topics to cover;
• Social media followers: social media has become hugely popular. People try to develop their social media accounts, and attract more people, by posting a lot of related material – this provokes comments, shares, likes, a lot of new followers, which leads to an extension of your popularity far beyond social media, which means more backlinks. Just don’t forget to communicate with your audience;
• Feedback is the golden apple in your pocket: feedback from ordinary people about how great your content is on your website or others, especially from those who have some authority…all this makes you more reliable and interesting. People like to read a comments section first and then build up their opinion about your product. Bad feedback about you can spread faster than you can even imagine, so be on the ball.

2. Reputation

With a well written article, you will build up a reputation as a writer, a good one or bad one. Accordingly, you will create a definite impression of your website throughout the Internet. Google is also watching you.

• By providing readers with great, fresh, and relevant content you will build your own authority and heighten the level of credibility among them and specifically in the niche you perform in. People perceive you as a professional concerning the sphere you are writing your posts about, which actually influences your traffic as well. We go directly to the most clued in people, because we believe them and their content;
• Remember that an earned reputation always works for you. Guest blogging is not a single article. You can guest publish on a regular basis, so be sure to provide quality and meet deadlines. Webmasters will not ever give you any opportunity to write anything for them once again if you can’t reassure them that you are a writer they need and who follows their rules.

3. Guest Blogging Opportunities and Business Benefits

Guest blogging provides you not only with people who come to your website, it gives you much more than you can think about at the moment. Let’s dive into this deeper:

• By posting your article on other websites besides yours, you extend your circle of acquaintance. They can be your potential partners, webmasters for other sites on which you can post your articles, and even candidates for ad hoc link exchanges. This is a widespread fact that your friends can give you more than you think. They are happy to be your accountants as well;
• Guest blogging gives you a chance to spread the word about your products. In your guest posts you can easily present your products, showing their benefits and importance to users. However, be careful, please: people don’t like direct advertisements. Even if they are not going to buy your products as soon as they read your article, people will be informed that such products exist. They can spread this information further, share this, and keep it all in mind. Who knows, maybe one day they’ll come to your website and become your customers;
• Such alink building strategy opens some new business opportunities. This could be a business collaboration with other website owners. With a greater amount of traffic which comes after a successful guest post, you can get the chance to offer webinars, teaching courses, new products and much more.

4. Better Search Engine Rankings

Google likes quality, and when it sees quality it works for you. So, this is one more chance to work on your SEO, for instance, to heighten your domain and page authority. In addition, if there are a lot of backlinks to your website and those are from trustworthy sites, Google can reward you with some extra points. Apart from this, with guest posts you can find an extra opportunity to promote other related articles in the form of anchor links.

5. Personal Benefits

There are a lot of benefits of guest blogging. With this you not only bring success to your website, you can also receive something for yourself:

• Guest blogging for someone who has never done this before is a new and useful experience. While writing for a new source, you will put all your knowledge and talent into each word you use. Creating content for new people always means new ways of writing, because the audience of big sites will be wider, more complex and more diverse than on your site. You should take into account each of these details and write something that fits everybody;
• You will improve your writing skills. When writing a new article, you will put all your talent into the process and make yourself a better writer. The more qualitative content you create, using new words, phrases, sentence structures, etc., the more experience and tips for writing you obtain. In each sentence you will use something new and “communicate” with the audience on a new level. Just compare your first articles and last ones and you will see what I’m talking about;
• You create unique content. Guest blogging is not only posting your material on a popular website. You still compete with people who are already popular in your niche and have some authority which is bigger than yours is. It is a real struggle to write something unique and catchy about topics that have already been mentioned. Outline yourself among competitors and offer something new for even old topics. Once you’ve done this, you can be proud of yourself and get traffic;
• Self-promotion comes with guest blogging. In guest posts you advertise not only your content and company, but also You “sell” your knowledge, skills, products, if they exist, and your name which is given in a bio after or before the post. You create your portfolio as well.

As well as other link building ideas, guest blogging, despite such juicy pros, also has its cons and they should be explored. Again we have a short list that includes a lot.

1. You Depend on Other People

If you write for websites, you should follow the rules and you may encounter not so pleasant consequences sometimes. This means:

• Somebody else may build their own authority using your name and material. If your article is well done, people will read it and spread it with the link to the website that contains the needed article, and this is not yours. People will visit your site only if they read your content till the end, so a significant part of the backlinks your post receives will go to the benefit of the website you wrote for;
• Your article can be rejected. This depends on you and a website owner. If the content you’ve written is pretty poor and boring for a webmaster, he or she can reject your post and next time “look” at you with suspicion and disbelief;
• Editing can eliminate your uniqueness. Webmasters have a right to “clean” your content, change it a little bit, or give it to a professional editor and proofreader, who will investigate your material from A to Z. They can erase a part that sounds great for you and or change things to fit their opinion or business more. This happens more when you are a newcomer and don’t have a name and the needed experience.

2. No Guarantees

Link building ideas can’t guarantee you success, so you should not rely on one strategy. Here are the main reasons why guest blogging can pass you by:

• Because of the popularity of guest blogging, you may not be chosen to write something for websites with, for example, a high domain authority. This can happen because of the low popularity of your name, i.e. an article from an unknown author may not be OK with a big site. However, you can start with websites which are not so widespread and, by a step by step process, reach those you’ve been dreaming about;
• It takes a lot of time to see some results of guest blogging. If you want to see them right away, you should write as a guest more However, it’s unlikely for this to work, because writing of great articles is a long process, as everything should be unique. Great content demands great effort.

3. Harmful Impact

• Harmful associations can’t be avoided on the Internet, where surroundings are not so clean. They appear when you post your articles on untrustworthy or toxic websites, when people who share them have already lost their reputation, or if you decide to go for plagiarism. To protect yourself and your website from a Google penalty you should always check websites you are going to write for and present only unique material;
• Never go to spammy websites or those which are of low quality, if you don’t want to lose link quality, because this may damage your website’s rankings. You can check the quality of backlinks with the help of the WebCEO Backlink Quality Check Tool, which gives full information regarding the parameters and the level of reliability of all your backlinks;
• Spammers are everywhere. No-one will ever beat them. They come to every house and make it dirty. Be aware of this and clean the territory of your website and the post’s comment section after posting your guest post.

4. Great Risks

Nowadays risks are everywhere. However, forewarned is forearmed!

• One of the greatest risks is to not understand your target audience. Make time to analyze deeply who you will write an article for as well as the website itself – whether if fits your niche or not. If you write an article for basketball lovers and put this into the table sports section, this will be your greatest failure: you will never get even a single reader;
• With bad writing you can just forget about guest blogging at all. We don’t even need more words here;
• Content syndication is when your content is published on multiple websites. So the place of your content will not be unique anymore and your article will be spread all over the Internet. For SEO this means duplicate content which Google doesn’t like, but if this is tagged (rel=canonical) and indexed (content=”noindex,follow”) properly, everything will be okay.

5. Personal Losses

Everybody values their resources and people who do guest blogging are not an exception.

• Guest blogging always means unpaid work. This doesn’t matter if your material is great enough to even be published for money in papers or magazines: in this case you will get no money – only web benefits;
• You will spend a lot of time and effort for a single article, making unique and interesting content, and this can be really sad if you don’t get anything in the end;
• Too much time for guest blogging and too little time for your own website. It is always vitally important to find balance between guest blogging and your own website updates. You can be popular enough to guest blog more often, but there is no sense in this if you can’t offer fresh content to your own site’s audience. They will bounce more often this way.

LET’S GET STARTED!

Your target audience will be your potential clients; people who are interested in content you create. Those can be representatives of different ages, locations, and spheres of interest. It is rather important to properly identify a circle of people who can be interested in your further content. Even a single guest post should be prepared carefully and be focused on the needed audience.

There are a few steps you should take to find relevant new readers:

1. Analyze your current audience to understand who is already interested in content you provide. This is rather important because with the help of this step you can find out ways to extend your audience. Learn who they are: age, gender, location, educational level, income level, and their occupation (through fast surveys on your website or during sign up). Then go into personal things like personality, hobbies, and lifestyle.

2. This will come in handy if you conduct such research concerning your competitors’ audiences as well in order to understand who is interested in them and, of course, what they offer to their readers. Why should you do this? Because a competitor’s audience is also your potential audience as both of you provide material/products of the same niche. Learn why people go to their websites instead of yours, do better, and welcome people at your place.

3. Analyze the topic you are going to write about and analyze the statistics regarding its demand among different layers of population, ages and locations. Maybe you should spend more time on research and then think carefully about following a certain writing style and type of presenting information – how exactly you can attract people who are interested in your niche and have them fully satisfied with your content.

4. Write an article, taking into account everything that has been mentioned.

A tool which you can use to get necessary data: Google Analytics, which will disclose both types of data: demographic (age, gender, location) and physiographic (people’s lifestyle). In addition, this will show you information regarding sessions, bounce rate, transactions, and revenue on your website.

There are a lot of guest blogging sites where you can post your material, but the problem is to find the one or several that fit you best. This mission is not so simple, but you are definitely able to do this.

• The first thing you should do is to identify your niche – what you will write about and which topics you can cover as a After this you can bravely look for sites which are of your niche and where you can be useful. The simplest way to do this is to use Google. Type keywords related to your field in a search box and some of the best search results will be your candidates to choose from. Go to those websites’ blog sections if they have them, and start the investigation process: what they write about, who writes for them (businessmen, freelancers, or journalists), which topics are the most popular, etc. Maybe, some of them are looking for guest blogging writers.
• The next way is pretty widespread among those who often go for guest blogging. You just need to type your keywords with the next phrases or similar to them: “accepting guest posts”, “submit content”, “guest post”, etc. in a search box, and you will receive data on more sites for guest blogging. This is pretty simple and a little bit similar to the first variant, because further actions are alike: investigate everything, starting from available material and
• You yourself may be a frequent visitor of a website, where webmasters sometimes allow others to post articles. Then take this chance! This can obviously help you because you already know the audience of the website and, maybe, you even know some users who may be interested in your content/products.
• The next great source is Connectively, a website which provides journalists with new contacts for content they want to write about. This is not a guest blogging opportunity per se, but close to it. You can write a decent text and image outline for a journalist to officially write an article with their own byline, but with a link to your website. You should remember that your content in this case should be of the highest quality, relevant and compelling enough for the journalist to want to put their name on it and link to you.
• Apart from this, you can always try to knock on the doors of the most popular websites which are known to almost every blogger, for example, HubSpot, Marketing Land, Entrepreneur, Alltop.com, and many others. However, take into account your popularity and the direction you want to choose for your article! Small websites are also a valuable source if you are just a beginner and don’t have any experience in this sphere.
• Don’t forget that you can use your competitors to find new places where your content will be a perfect match. WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy Tool will show you detailed information on your competitors’ backlink profiles. The data will let you know which websites are relevant to your type of content. These sites, which link to your competitors now, can potentially link to your site in the near future. With this insight, you will open new paths for promoting your material and new topics to work on, proving that you are a great representative of your niche. Analyze the content of your competitors, learn their good and bad aspects, create great copy that will stand out, and then offer it to webmasters who previously thought that your competitors were worth linking to.

• In addition, you can check a list of 200+ websites which are accepting guest posts in 2022 or a huge list of 5000+ guest posting sites, and another one with about 54 guest posting websites, in order to find the best place!

An important thing to remember before you go to the next step: ALWAYS check the quality of websites you’ve chosen to write an article for: domain authority, number of backlinks, security, website’s traffic through Alexa, and even people’s words about those websites, if this is possible.

Once you’ve found a website which looks like a good fit for you, negotiations begin. You want a backlink in exchange for your piece, but there’s more than one option to consider. What kind of backlink is the best?

Ideally, of course, you want to shoot for dofollow links in your guest posts. However, most websites which accept contributions have a “nofollow links only” policy for their guest authors. It’s not as bad as it sounds; nofollow links are only slightly less powerful than dofollow. Despite the name, sometimes Google may actually follow and crawl those links (which is what they mean by treating “nofollow” as a hint signal) to evaluate content on the linked pages.

Let’s also not forget about rel=”sponsored” links. As the name implies, the rel=”sponsored” attribute is reserved for paid links (e.g. sponsored posts). You may remember that Google doesn’t approve of the practice of buying backlinks, but it’s fair game if a link is openly declared as such by using this attribute. That way, nobody will be penalized, though it does tell Google about the insentive behind placing such a link, and it will be evaluated accordingly.

But don’t let it get to you. Dofollow, nofollow and sponsored links look all the same to users, so you won’t be missing out on user traffic. That comes down solely to the website’s popularity and your own post’s quality.

We have come to the most important part.

After you’ve found a website you want to write for, the next thing to do is to contact its owner in order to get permission for your article to be posted on the website. It is better to choose several topics and then offer them altogether. This will give a webmaster an opportunity to choose from and see that you can master more than one topic. Accordingly, you get more chances to be chosen or at least to be kept in mind. However, as this was mentioned a bit earlier, there is no 100% guarantee that you will be approved immediately, so don’t wait for instant results.

The way you contact a webmaster is pretty simple – through email or social media messaging systems, the most important of which is LinkedIn. However, this also demands some effort. Nowadays there are a lot of writers who want their material to be published, so you should be outstanding starting from the subject of your letter. You have to raise some interest from the very first words in order to be noticed among thousands of similar letters; choose something unusual and catchy, something that will definitely attract some attention to you.

After that you should work on the body of your letter. The same conditions: catchy, interesting, and beneficial for a website owner, not for you. We prefer to communicate with polite people who know something about etiquette, don’t we? So, don’t be cheap on politeness and complements and describe why their website got your attention and which posts particularly, and then write about things you want to give to their benefit. Be direct, short, and present two or three ideas, cogently describing their filling: topic, headline, and word count. If you have some great material on your website, you can leave some links in order to show that you are talented and professional enough to write for somebody. Here is a simple example, which is not obligatory to use:

To: webmaster@gmail.com

From: iwillwriteforyou@gmail.com

Subject: Do you have an article about baking fruit into pies and cakes?

Hello Jenny!

I’ve been reading you for a long time, realizing day by day that you provide, undoubtedly, the best material in your niche. However, I’ve noticed that you haven’t published any article concerning baking fruit into pies. I would be really glad to provide you with a great article about this and offer you some other variants:

#1

Topic: Bakery.

Headline: “Donuts and Cakes with Fruit Are All You Need”.

Word count: 1500 – 2000.

#2

Topic: Science.

Headline: “Lemons for Science or How to Start Liking Lemons”.

Word count: 1500 – 2000.

#3

Topic: SEO.

Headline: “WebCEO gives you the best fruit related keywords”.

Word count: 1500 – 2000.

 

You’d get a lot of traffic with one of these articles. I have a lot of experience in writing, with such articles as you can find here and here: *links*

Thank you! I will wait for your response.

 

Best regards,

Sally.

However, remember, that some serious and authoritative websites will ignore you. Let’s take The New York Times as an example here. They accept Op-Ed essays but mostly only from their favored contacts. In this case you should be polite, formal, direct, and cogent, especially in your subject line. It is also better to have a widespread name and high authority in terms of your sphere to have a chance of writing for them.

You can learn some other details about essay submission to The New York Times.

The next step is to wait. An answer to a good proposal can come after a whole week, if not longer, so don’t give up hope the next day. After you have received an approval message, it’s high time to start writing AND send a “Thank you” letter to the webmaster for the given opportunity.

Here are also some inspiring pieces of advice of How to Never Run Out of Blog Post Ideas. Check this out in order to always be ahead of your competitors and not undergo “freezing periods”.

First things first: make sure you can attach your guest writer’s bio to your posts wherever possible – and, fortunately, it is possible almost everywhere. Aside from introducing yourself in your bio, make sure to link to your social media profiles as well: that’s what Google uses to establish that different pieces of content were written by the same author.

SEO and Google search are entering an age of entities, an age that’s expected to revolutionize or even replace link building as we know it. Becoming one such entity will definitely make your name carry a lot of weight – and, if you can become famous, so will your website.

What about the more proactive ways of boosting your popularity?

The first option is to use your own website: leave a link to your guest post, so your visitors will be able to enjoy your content more and may become your constant readers.

The second option is to use social media. Leave a short and challenging description with a link and your post picture on all your accounts with appropriate hashtags. Going through hashtags, people can notice your post, read it, like it, and share it with others in the end, which means more traffic, followers, and subscribers on your website via the guest post on the other site. In other words, you can increase your traffic via social media, even if you are directly linking only to the other website.

In your social media post, you can tag people who will be alerted to your post automatically. This is a sneaky but effective way to gain attention from such people.

Performance Tracking.

Be sure to use the WebCEO Chosen Link Watch Tool in order to keep track of the backlinks to the guest post on the other website – those ones which you strived to get with guest blogging. This tool is extremely useful to monitor your links and be aware if:

1. a webmaster changed the anchor text of your link;
2. a webmaster tagged your link as nofollow:
3. a webmaster eliminated your link entirely;
4. a webmaster applied user-agent cloaking.

If you encounter these violations you can take appropriate measures. Never give anybody an opportunity to deprive you of an award for hard work!

TO SUMMARIZE: guest blogging has a lot to offer. First, this is a great opportunity to present your content to a new audience interested in your niche and converting people into your readers. Second, this is a rather successful method of building backlinks and getting traffic for your website. Of course, this is not perfect, but in capable hands, guest blogging can bring a lot of benefits. WebCEO is always by your side to help you. Find real link opportunities with WebCEO right away:

The post An Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging That Works appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

In the previous chapter, we discussed important off-page SEO factors that need to be constantly monitored and implemented for the growth of your website’s popularity. Today we will discuss local SEO. 

Local SEO is a huge topic for discussion. Google says it wants to give everybody an opportunity to be seen in local search results. If you are in the local league, then this chapter is a must read. 

CHAPTER 5: LOCAL SEO

Spotlight: GOOGLE MY BUSINESS – A MUST HAVE

Google My Business was launched in 2014 and has been helping local businesses get seen on the SERPs, primarily as Maps results. It’s the most important directory listing of all these days. You must have this directory filled out with important information for prospective customers.

This is the way the information about your business is presented in local search results on a desktop:

and on a mobile device:

N/B: These screenshots are for business categories that supply customers with food and beverage. If your business is from another category, there is a subtle difference between sections presented in the side bar except for permanent ones.  Permanent sections are: Home, Posts, Info, Insights, Reviews, Messaging, Photos, Website, Users, Products.

Basically, you will only need to fill out some forms. Once your listing is accepted, you will be able to see analytics data and this data can also be imported into the WebCEO tools.

The “Insights” section will provide data on:

• queries your business was found for;
• the way customers reached your business: direct, discovery or branded search;
• where your business was found (the “Views” section): on Google Maps or Google Search;
• customer actions: website visits, direction requests and phone calls;
• popular time: time periods your business is demanded most often;
• photo views.

After that you will want to update the information as often as possible to give customers only the freshest data. 

• Apart from that, you will be able to “work with your customers”: process incoming reviews (reply to them, edit them and delete) via Google My Business, start messaging with your customers, and upload some posts and photos. 
• If you don’t have a website for your business – it’s not a problem anymore, because with Google My Business you can easily create one.  
• You can keep track of your business even if you have a chain of stores and you can add as many users as you wish to the account. They will help you manage and watch everything that happens at your office/restaurant/cafe, etc. 

Google My Business has become a major free business listing platform. Don’t wait to create an account there! As soon as you’ve done this, WebCEO will open a new door for you. 

WebCEO’s Google My Business Module was created to help users keep an eye on their local performance and reveal their weak and strong sides of their business activity. WebCEO integrates well with Google My Business. 

WebCEO adds some extra conveniences such as an easier location switcher if you manage a chain, an opportunity to find and analyze your competitors and add their domains to other WebCEO tools. Also, WebCEO allows a user to compare and analyze data from different time periods. 

Spotlight: LOCAL FOCUSED WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION

To perform well in the SERPs you will not only need an optimized Google My Business account, but also some work done on your website. People will find your business because of keywords you are going to optimize your website for.

Your goal is to appear in the Google Local 3 Pack:

Here are some tips on local optimization that you should check with double accuracy:

• Localize your keywords adding the exact business location to your content: coffee houses in New York, best pizza in Washington, DC., etc.
• Use long tail keywords that include other words people use to describe your location and specific well known places that are near business.  
• Create a page with a detailed NAPU, working hours, service/product description, and pricing;
• Make your website mobile-friendly because people mostly use local search on their mobile devices;
• Insert important information about your special services and products in a snippet, such as “Pastry for special occasions. Wedding and Birthday Cakes. Christmas Pies. Every day, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Online orders. Free delivery”;
• Create content that will be relevant to your local business: this is an opportunity to increase your authority. Create more than three pages of content with keywords that are relevant to your business, for instance add a brief history of your industry, fresh news, announcements, updates, seasonal menus or special offers, prominent figures, and so on;
• Google My Business is not the only local directory on the Internet. Submit your website to other major and popular directories, such as Facebook, Apple Maps, Yelp, Bing, Yellow Pages, etc. 

 IMPORTANT!  Google no longer shows self-serving reviews that were inserted in a website’s markup or taken from third-party websites. This change was implemented in September 2019 as a part of the Google September 2019 Core Update.

Spotlight: COVID-19 MEASURES TO FOLLOW

I doubt this section will be breaking news, but Covid updates show Google you’re an active business, so it’s important to keep this in mind:

1. Implement changes Google offered and present new services.

Google has helped local businesses via Google My Business. They implemented new types of attributes that help potential customers to see what businesses are safest to attend. 

Change your workflow according to some of these attributes (better to work on each of them):

Mention the opportunity for contactless payment. 

Google introduced a new feature – Food Ordering. You will get a button “Online Order” right on the SERP. You will have to cooperate with “approved third party providers” to activate this type of feature. 

We can’t predict how long the situation will last, but we are sure that these types of services – that ease people’s interaction with local businesses – will be popular forever. 

Consider the opportunity to always work with delivery, takeaway, online ordering and so on. 

Even such businesses that require a physical presence can be adjusted to current times: there are a lot of services for communication or video presentations and other types of activities. 

Of course, if your business is open to welcome visitors, remember to mention online that you follow basic safety measures, such as handwashing and antiseptic stations and servers wearing various forms of protection. 

2. Modify content on your website.

If there are any changes you want to introduce regarding COVID-19, emphasize them on your website:

• Banners on the index page of your website

This is a perfect place for advertising banners and announcements. Such announcements can cover new services you would implement for people to know about them and use them.

• Content and snippets

Ad banners will eventually be removed from your index page, but you can immortalize information by adding it to the main website content. Hence, it will also be seen by people in the SERPs. 

Also, edit your snippets to outline new available services. This can be a temporary decision for the time when you want to draw the attention of a greater audience. 

Spotlight: PPC/GOOGLE ADS FOR LOCAL BUSINESSES

Google Ads is not a compulsory way to promote your business. However, it will be extremely useful if you want to get quick results. The difference is in the working process: you have to work on your ad in a local-focused way, i.e.:

• define products you want to advertise and Google will show this ad to people who use similar queries to find that very product within the area you’ve chosen;
• create themed landing pages, two or three pages for each campaign, to analyze which one works better and brings more traffic. Remember that these should be relevant to the products you are going to promote. 
• you have to choose localized keywords and point to the exact territory you want your advertisement to be shown within. Don’t forget to indicate specific languages your marketing campaigns are built for, etc.;
• prepare text that will complete local criteria: these may be seasonal or holiday discount events that are typical for a particular area. Use local services, i.e. delivery companies that are available in your region, to make a user’s online and offline experience better and easier.

Spotlight: GOOGLE LOCAL SERVICES ADS

[ currently available only in the USA and Canada ]

Aside from Google Ads there is a platform from Google that will help you find more clients on the Internet. That is Google Local Services Ads. This is more than just advertising; this is a guarantee from Google that your business deserves its place under the sun. 

Access to Google Local Services Ads gives you a line of real benefits: 

• more real clients;
• client flow management;
• clear picture of your advertising campaign success;
• an opportunity to ask your clients for reviews;
• the procedures are similar to Google Ads;
• you will pay only after a real call or message.

Local Services Ads operates two types of badges one of which a business gets after signing in to Local Services:

GOOGLE GUARANTEED

To receive this badge your business has to go through a background check and license and insurance verification. This badge is for in-home services, such as plumbing, locksmithing, electricity, etc. 

The peculiarity of “Google Guaranteed” is that you not only have Google’s praise and opportunity to appear in local services ads, but also coverage from the company for unsatisfied clients (max. $2000/CAD $2000 per business for a lifetime). 

HOW DOES GOOGLE COVERAGE WORK?

An unsatisfied client has a right to submit a claim and receive his or her money back from Google (the amount of money spent on a service, not $2000 at once). But only if the service was booked via Google Local Services Ads. Google will give the business a chance to resolve the conflict and, after its own investigation, the outcome will be announced

N/B: you can’t use the badge on your website. It appears only in local services ads listings.

GOOGLE SCREENED

This badge is available for such spheres as Law, Financial Planning, and Real Estate.

A business can apply for the badge only if it has a 3.0 rating or higher. A business will also go through a massive background and license check. 

The Google Screened designation doesn’t have Google coverage. 

Tools to use:

Google My Business will help you manage all the sides of your local performance and make it visible on the SERPs.

Google Local Services Ads will help you a lot in advertising and looking for real clients. 

The WebCEO Google My Business Module will extend your possibilities in interpreting your local SEO results. It will show you how well you’ve been doing during specific periods of time and will help you organize communication with customers and conduct analysis of your competitors without extra clicks and page shifting. 

As an all-in-one SEO platform, WebCEO guarantees you an easy workflow. Integrations with valuable sources of data help users engage themselves and get profitable results while saving time not gathering data on their own from many different places on the Internet.

IN CONCLUSION, we hope that we have comprehensively answered your question “how to do SEO yourself?” These chapters were rich and full of cost-effective DIY SEO tips. We hope that all our tips and explanations were clear to you.

It’s time to work! Create a to-do list for yourself and start the work as soon as you are ready. It is important to not only keep track of new features, updates and services, but also to implement them and always keep them in your mind. 

WebCEO is ready to help you with new ideas that appear on the radar. Start your journey with WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool and optimize your website to attract new customers and increase your rankings!

The post DIY SEO Guide for Beginners: Attract Local Customers Online. Part V appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.