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

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

1. Rethink your website structure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Optimize your internal links

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

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

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

3. Fix broken links

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

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Technical Audit.

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

4. Fix broken images

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

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Technical Audit.

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

5. Have your site’s pages indexed

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

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Sitemap Generation.

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

6. Check your on-page SEO

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

What are the technical aspects of on-page SEO?

Page titles

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

Meta descriptions

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

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

H1 tags

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

Images’ ALT attributes

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

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

7. Fix duplicate content issues

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

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

8. Improve slow-loading pages

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

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

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

Here’s how you can raise loading speed:

Optimize your images

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

Minimize page code

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

Merge elements

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

Compress elements

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

Minimize redirects

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

Choose the best hosting for your site

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

Host big files on external platforms

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

Use browser caching

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

9. Optimize your site for mobile

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

Here are a few more steps to complete the process.

Responsive design

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

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

Space between elements

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

No Flash content

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

No annoying popups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Check for penalties from Google

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

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

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

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

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

2. Run a thorough keyword audit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now for user search intent.

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

3. Check your Google Business Profile

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

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

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

• Is any information missing?

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

Mind the character limits too.

• Are keywords present and used properly?

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

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

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

• Are photos and other images uploaded?

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

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

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

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

• What is the posting activity like?

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

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

• Is there an FAQ page?

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

4. Find on-page SEO issues

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Perform a backlink audit

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

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

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

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

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

6. Evaluate your online reputation

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

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

• Reviews

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

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

• Ratings

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

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

• Citations and mentions

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

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

• Social media engagement

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

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

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

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

7. Check data from Google Analytics

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. Audit your structured data

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

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

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

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

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

9. Evaluate the quality of your user experience

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

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

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

10. Analyze your competitors

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

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

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

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

Open Settings and enter this information:

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

Press Save.

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

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

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

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

11. Perform a local content audit

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

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

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

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

So how do you run a local content audit?

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

12. Analyze your social media activity

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

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

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

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

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

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

13. Find and get rid of duplicate content

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

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

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

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

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

• NAPU citations
• Reviews and testimonials
• Directory listings

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

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

14. Check your internal linking structure for flaws

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

What kind of problems can you find?

• Orphan pages.

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

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

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

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

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

• Low-quality or missing anchor texts.

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

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

15. Make sure you have NAPU citations

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

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

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

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

Afterword

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

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

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

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

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

Why are long tail keywords important for SEO?

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

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

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

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

How to find the best long tail keywords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to find long tail keywords using free tools

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

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

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

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

2. Quora and other Q&A sites

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

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

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

3. Answer the Public

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

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

4. Google Search Console

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

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

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

How to use long tail keywords on your site

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

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

• Vary the Title tag and headings.

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

• Use long tail variations in your content.

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

• Pay attention to all on-page elements.

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

• Vary your internal links.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here’s how you meet them.

1. Making the best content

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

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

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

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

So, how do you satisfy search intent?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Emulate the more successful sites.

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

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

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2. Optimizing content for search engines

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

Use keywords that will bring you the most traffic

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

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

The best keywords have these traits:

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

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

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

Make your site mobile-friendly

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

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

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

Fix technical errors

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

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

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

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

Fix SEO errors

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

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

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

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

Break your content into segments

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

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

Use high-quality visuals

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

Images:

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

Videos:

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

Increase site loading speed

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

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

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

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3. Promoting content

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

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

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

Build links strategically

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

Because this plan is missing several crucial steps.

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

Simply put, here’s the plan:

1. Expose other sites to your content

2. Give them an incentive to link to it

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

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

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

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

Make your site appear in no-click searches

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

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

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

Share your content in social media

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

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

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

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Use email outreach

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

How do you make this method work for you?

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

Afterword

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

By checking these metrics in Google Analytics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1. Make your site easy to browse

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

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

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

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

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

2. Optimize your news site

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

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

Find keywords, pronto!

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

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

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Keywords are to be placed in:

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

Use shareable images

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

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

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

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

Avoid duplicate content

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

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

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

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

3. Keep your site operational

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

Improve your site loading speed

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

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

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

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

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Make your site mobile-friendly

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

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

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

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

Are your news a good read on mobile? Sign Up Free

Fix technical errors

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

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

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4. Build relevant links

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

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

Check who links to your news: Sign Up Free

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

5. Use social media

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

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

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

Be present everywhere

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

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

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

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

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

Find the best times to post

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

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

Facebook:

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

YouTube:

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

Instagram:

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

Twitter:

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

LinkedIn:

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

TikTok:

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

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

Link to your social pages from your site

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

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

Implement buttons to share your articles in social media

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

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

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

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

6. Get featured in Google News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Find keywords that sell

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

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

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

Where can you find long-tail keywords?

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

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

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

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

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

2. Interlink your store’s pages

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

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

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

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

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

3. Enhance your site with schema markup

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

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

4. Make your online store secure

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

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

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

5. Index your ecommerce site’s pages

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

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

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

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

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

6. Make your store mobile-friendly

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

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

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

7. Start a blog on your site

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

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

8. Build links to your online shop

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

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

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

9. Audit your site for errors

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

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

10. Monitor your rankings and traffic

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

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

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

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

BONUS Tip. Convert your organic traffic like a pro

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Begin Your eCommerce SEO Sign up Free

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

SEO freelancers come in two types. Some are relatively (maybe even completely) new at SEO, and they plan to learn as they work. Others have already been employed in this field, so they pack enough experience and knowledge to fill out a portfolio. Clearly, the latter have an advantage… And they are keener on the fact that SEO requires tools: both to get results and to get them in time.

Where exactly does expert SEO contractor need SEO tools? They are used where SEO can’t be done manually and where they can speed up the work. Let’s take a look at the SEO tasks that freelancers usually do.

1. Keyword research

SEO begins with keyword research. It might be different for you if you work in a team of freelancers, but someone has to do it. And if you work alone, it can’t be avoided at all, so why not get good at it?

Looking for keywords is easy enough. First, come up with a few ideas. Then open WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool, enter what’s on your mind and press Search. Something you will like ought to appear in the results.

But your job is to find high-quality keywords that will bring the most traffic to your employer’s site, right? So you can’t just end it here.

Follow these steps to find the best keywords from the lot.

• Choose keywords with clear search intent. For example, “green pajamas” isn’t good enough. “Buy green pajamas” is good, and “buy green pajamas for boys” is even better.
• Choose keywords with the highest search volume. More people typing a search phrase in Google means more potential users for you.
• Keep an eye on the keyword trends. You might not want to use a keyword whose popularity is dwindling, and vice versa.
• Check the keywords your competitors are ranking for. This can be done in the Spy on competitors tab. Enter a competitor website’s URL and see their ranking keywords.
• Check the keywords you are ranking for, but aren’t using. You can do it in the Keywords from Search Console tab. It’s a good place to look for keywords, especially if you haven’t used Keyword Suggestions yet.

It also helps to organize your keywords, especially when you are working on multiple projects at once. To do that, make use of WebCEO’s Keyword Basket.

If you’ve created a project in WebCEO before, you will remember the wizard asking you to enter your keywords. They can always be changed later (for example, in the Rank Tracking tool), but whatever keywords you are using will be automatically put in the Keyword Basket. That’s where you can assign tags to your keywords.

How does it help you?

If you are trying to rank for a lot of keywords – dozens, maybe even hundreds – you risk making a mess. It becomes necessary to categorize them in order to avoid confusion. By assigning a tag to each keyword, you make it easy to find with the basket’s search function – for example, if you want to delete a keyword you stopped using.

2. On-page optimization

To optimize a page means to bring it as close to Google’s content quality standards as possible. Poorly optimized pages can rank high under certain conditions, but don’t count on it. One neglected page may be enough to kill your freelancing career.

Fortunately, there’s no need to eyeball every page of your projects and look for SEO issues yourself. SEO tools exist to make optimizing much faster and easier.

Keep your pages optimized with keywords

Besides the text on a page, there are other places where keywords make a difference for your SEO. In no particular order, they are:

• Page URL
• <title> tag
• <meta description> tag
• H1-H4 header tags
• Images’ file names, captions and <alt> attributes.

Check your site for SEO errors with WebCEO’s On-Site Issues Overview tool. If you forgot to optimize any of those places, it will help you remember.

Keep a low page load time

If a website loads slowly even after months of being in your care, that’s going to raise a few eyebrows. Why take unnecessary blows to your reputation? It’s good for SEO when a site is quick to load, anyway.

Here’s how you can get extra ranking points for speed:

• Minimize your images’ file size
• Get rid of excessive HTML, CSS, Javascript and other code
• Get rid of the redirects the site can do without
• Define site elements to cache in the .htaccess file
• Enable Gzip compression
• Host large files on external platforms
• “I like to live dangerously” option: re-host the website on a faster server or a content delivery network

Check your site for speed-related problems with WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool. The higher your score, the better.

Make the website mobile-friendly

Optimizing a site for mobile from scratch can be a pain, but it’s vital for SEO. At the end of the day, you are your own boss – so take it like one.

What does a site need to be mobile-friendly?

1. Responsive design. This step requires you to have some knowledge in HTML and CSS, but it’s easy enough that even middle schoolers can master it.

2. No intrusive popups. Advertisements and various disclaimers may carry important information, but they are little more than distractions to users. Use popups if you must, but don’t let them cover too much of the screen.

3. Fast loading speed. Between PC and mobile users, the latter tend to be less willing to wait.

4. Easy-to-use interface. Mobile screens are small, and users’ fingers aren’t as precise as mouse cursors. Keep these two facts in mind when tweaking your website’s design.

Test your site with WebCEO’s Mobile Optimization tool to check how mobile-friendly it is.

Monitor the performance of the landing pages

Your site will have pages whose performance in Google will indicate the success of your work. Most likely, those will be the home page and a number of landing pages. Monitor their performance in a few simple steps.

1. First, you need to give WebCEO the URLs of your landing pages. Open the Landing Pages Overview tool and click on the Add landing page button menu.

1.1. If there are only a few landing pages, choose Add manually. Enter a page’s URL and give it a name. Press Save and repeat this step for each landing page.

1. 2. If you have a CSV file listing all of your landing pages (if there are too many to add manually), you can choose Import from CSV file.

2. Open the Top Pages from Search Console tool. Click on the Filters menu and set Pages to Landing pages only. (If it’s already set to Landing pages only, leave it be.) Now you can see all your landing pages’ clicks, sessions, impressions, click-through rates and the average position in Google. You can also click on a landing page’s URL to see the search queries that bring it traffic, as well as how well those queries work.

3. Technical auditing

Some errors are in plain view, like the error 502. Others are less obvious and may be harder to spot. In both cases, SEO tools that can detect errors and the harm they bring are your friend. For obvious reasons, fixing website errors often falls on freelancers’ shoulders.

Sadly, there are no tools that will automatically fix errors for you. On the other hand, if there were, you’d be out of job, so keep your head high! At least you have the means to make the error-fixing so much faster.

Just scan your site with WebCEO’s Technical Audit tool.

And then proceed to fix what you’ve found.

4. Building quality backlinks

What link building-related tasks do freelancers do?

Building backlinks (obviously)

This is the most difficult task, and hats off to you if it’s your specialty. One of the best methods of discovering link building opportunities is to check what sites are linking to competitor websites – easily done with the help of WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy tool. If you don’t know your competitors yet, find them first with the Dangerous Competitors tool.

Another popular way of creating backlinks is through content submission. The Content Submission tool can automatically submit your site to dozens of websites and directories, but there’s an important rule to remember: linking pages must be contextually related to your site.

Weeding out toxic backlinks

When do backlinks lower your rankings instead of raising them?

• When they are spammy (i.e. too many are made in a short time)
• When the linking pages aren’t contextually related to your site
• When the linking site’s domain authority is lower than yours

The more of those toxic backlinks you have amassed, the bigger problem they pose – not just for the site, but also for the person who has to get rid of them. That’s you, of course.

The first step of cleaning the mess is to open WebCEO’s Toxic Pages tool.

In order to generate an up-to-date report with toxic links, you need to rescan your site’s backlinks (or scan it for the first time if you have never done it before). Click on the menu labeled Scanned X days ago and choose Rescan all reports. Once you have the freshest data, you can get to work.

How does the tool find toxic backlinks? It has default settings for what kind of pages to consider toxic, which you can change anytime. Either press the Settings button and choosing the Toxicity factors tab, or click on the Configure toxicity factors link which will send you to the same tab much faster. The most reliable way to spot toxic backlinks is to blacklist sites that you know are irrelevant.

Once you find toxic links, you can get rid of them either by taking them down yourself or asking the person who made them to do it. If neither worked (or was never an option to begin with), you can only disavow them in Google. The steps for disavowing toxic links are:

1. Selecting linking page URLs that you want to disavow.

2. Downloading the .txt file with selected URLs.

3. Opening the Google Disavow Tool and uploading your file.

The Toxic Pages tool lists these steps too, so you’ll never forget.

Improving anchor texts in the links on your site

Your site’s own internal links have power over its rankings, too. In order to maximize this ranking boost, the site needs a well-designed structure with a hierarchy of pages. The picture below shows a classic example of such structure.

If you’ve already got that covered, the next step is to optimize the internal links by putting keywords in their anchor texts.

You might even have links without no anchor text at all; that’s right there a wasted SEO opportunity. To find such links, bring up all anchor texts on your site with the Link Text Analysis tool.

5. Recovering from a drop in rankings

Is there a more common problem in SEO than losing rankings? It can occur for several reasons, and it will be up to you to investigate what exactly caused it. If you are lucky, your employer will already know the cause, and then you’ll just have to find a way to recover from damage.

These are the most common reasons for a drop in rankings:

• Google penalty. The website broke Google Webmaster Guidelines and was devalued for it. If that’s what happened, there should be a message about manual actions in Google Search Console with suggestions for what to do next.
• Google update. Google makes changes to its algorithm every day, but sometimes they are big enough to cause thousands of websites to lose their rankings. SEO communities are always onto such changes and will usually have a solution.
• Loss of backlinks. Find out if anything happened to your link profile in WebCEO’s Backlink Quality Check tool. If you lost some backlinks, either recover them or create new ones.
• Competitors broke through. If you know your direct competitors, compare their recent rankings against yours in the Competitors Rankings reports.
• Optimization issues. Has Google deemed the site poorly optimized? SEO or technical problems might be to blame. Test your site with WebCEO’s On-Site Issues Overview and Technical Audit tools. There might be only a few offending pages, but sometimes that’s all it takes to lose the top ranking positions.
• Content was changed recently. Some pages used to rank high until they were edited and Google crawled them again? Then it might be a good idea to fix whatever is wrong with new content – or just bring back the old.
• Bad keywords. It’s also possible the website simply isn’t using the most optimal keywords to rank for. Check WebCEO’s Site Rankings report for keywords whose rankings are dropping and try replacing them with different, better ones.

6. Social media optimization

And what if your job is to promote a website in social media?

Your plan will include creating pages on various platforms (if the owner hasn’t done so already) and posting on them until users love the website. This job hinges on engaging with the audience, both through updates and comments. Its success, however, is going to be determined by numbers: likes, subscribers, new website traffic and, ultimately, conversions.

Check how good you are at this job by monitoring your social media activity with WebCEO’s Social Engagement tool.

Inside you have:

• Mentions of your site’s pages in social media
• Mentions of competing sites’ pages, compared to yours
• Analysis of traffic received from social media

Since Facebook is the most popular platform, it will likely be your priority. Its influence is so big, it has its own group of separate reports in WebCEO to track your activity there: Facebook Insights.

And don’t forget to track mentions of your site in social media and on the Internet as a whole. User feedback judges your work like no SEO tool ever could. Not paying attention to what users say is a recipe for a PR nightmare.

Steer clear from tight spots with the Web Buzz Monitoring tool.

7. SEO tasks organization

SEO freelancers often work in teams and split the tasks between each other. Naturally, when you can automate some of the work and keep track of who does what, you become a productive dream team worth its weight in gold. What are the things you’d want to automate when doing SEO? Well, to name a few:

• Technical audits
• Site rankings checks
• Error alerts
• Toxic link alerts
• Weekly progress reports

The upside is obvious. Set your SEO tools to do all those things automatically, and you will have more time to spend on actual SEO.

WebCEO has three major features tailored for organization and automation: reports, email alerts and tasks. Here’s what you can do with each.

Reports

Every tool in WebCEO that relies on scanning your website has the words Scanned X days ago in the bar at the top of the screen. Click on them and choose Scan Schedule.

Check the Scan reports on schedule box, then just set the schedule for the tools you want to automate and click Save.

Next, if you want to receive automatic reports as well, click on PDF Reports in the navigation and choose Consolidated reports.

In order to create a new report, click on Add report in the new window and proceed to fill out the information.

• Name & Language. Here you can name your report, choose its language and select its date format.
• Projects. Choose the project(s) you want scanned and reported.
• Report contents. Here, each tool is broken down into its several reports. Simply choose the information you want to receive. Important! You must set every selected tool’s scan schedule before WebCEO generates your consolidated report, or else it will have outdated information.
• Automatic report mailing. Check the box in this tab if you want your reports mailed to you automatically. Once it’s checked, fill out the email information (sender, recipient, subject and message body) and set your preferred mailing schedule.
• PDF report branding. This tab is for customizing your report’s appearance. It’s especially useful if you want to hide from your employer the SEO tools you are using (which is a common practice for SEO agencies).

When you’ve finished filling out all the information, click Save, and you will start receiving your SEO reports on schedule. Edit your report’s settings anytime by clicking on the gear icon to the right of its name.

Email alerts

Consolidated reports are helpful, but they tend to have a lot of information. Sometimes you need the most important bits singled out, especially when something bad hits the fan and you need to act fast.

That’s what the email alerts are for.

In order to use the alerts feature, click on Reports in the top right corner of the service and select Email Alerts. From there, you can select situations you consider important enough to warrant a heads up. They include:

• A keyword losing positions
• Competitor gaining positions
• Technical error found
• Issues with links tracked in the Chosen Links Watch tool
• Loss of backlinks
• Rapid increase in backlinks
• Rapid increase in toxic backlinks

You can have any of this information automatically sent to you by email.

Tasks

Lastly, this is the more direct and thorough way to monitor your SEO progress – the Tasks feature. As the name suggests, it’s where you can create SEO tasks and assign them to the members of your group.

Click on Tasks in the navigation to see what it’s like.

Click on the Add promoted project button to get started. You will be asked to add the project you want to work on (it’s the one you created), at which point you can click Save and begin creating your tasks.

Chances are, of course, that your SEO tasks will be pretty standard: keyword research, technical auditing etc. In this case, save time by using the Library of Tasks and selecting some of the pre-made ones.

Note that in order to enable group work in WebCEO, you need to create a white label domain first. Fortunately, it’s even easier than using Tasks.

1. Click on the Main Menu icon () in the top right corner.

2. Choose White Label Domain.

3. Fill out your information in the popup window.

After that, just add a user for each of the members in your group and assign them to work on your current projects. Now that you are all working on the same domain, they can contribute to your Tasks section! Depending on their user role, they may even be able to create their own tasks for themselves.

Conclusion

SEO is as great career choice for freelancing as any. The worst mistake you can make is trying to do it all on your own, which is why there are two main ingredients for success: a hard-working team and professional SEO tools. We’ll leave the team building to you. The SEO tools? You’ve already found them.

You and your friends are going to make the best digital agency one day, trust me.

Start automating your SEO tasks now! Sign Up Free

The post SEO for Freelancers: How to Automate Your Work appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

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

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

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

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Why do podcasts need SEO?

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

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

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

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

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

So where do you start?

1. What every podcast should have

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

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

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

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

2. Find keywords and use them wisely

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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3. Maximize your page speed

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

What do you need to make your site load quickly?

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

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

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4. Make your site mobile-friendly

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

How do you optimize your site for mobile?

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

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

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

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

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

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5. Use internal links

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

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

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

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

6. Gain more backlinks

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Use social media

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

What else can you do?

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

8. Make your podcasts generate clicks

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

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

1. Titles, descriptions and URLs.

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

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

2. Structured data

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

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

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

3. The website itself

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

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

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

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

9. Get an RSS feed for your podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Bonus: get more subscribers

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

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

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

Afterword

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

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

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

YouTube is the second most visited website after Google – which makes it the second biggest search engine in the world. Online videos are great as entertainment and tempting as a source of income; it’s no wonder so many Internet users are going crazy over them. If you are one of those ambitious users, today is your lucky day! This step-by-step YouTube SEO guide has all you need to get your videos at the top of YouTube search.

So, what’s the first in our list of YouTube SEO tips?

1. Make a great video

The first and the most important rule of YouTube SEO: only high-quality videos may apply.

One of the biggest ranking factors for a video is how many users watch it from start to finish. This is also called user retention. If users give up on the video before it’s over, it’s no different from bouncing off, except with more severe effects. Your video needs to be so fantastic, the majority of viewers will stay and watch the whole thing. To reiterate: make an awesome video, or nothing will work.

It doesn’t matter how good you are at SEO; a bad video will never rank high, period. YouTube is a democracy where users decide which videos deserve to rank. No other site has taken the “content is king” principle to heart as much as YouTube. That’s why, before you even consider doing SEO, you need to make an excellent video. Start strong, or don’t start at all.

Have you made one already? You rock! Now you are ready for SEO.

2. Find the best video keywords

How to find YouTube keywords?

As usual, SEO starts with keywords and the means to find them. Since the goal is to rank in YouTube, why not make it the first place to look?

The number one source of keywords for YouTube is its search bar.

Start typing in the bar, and YouTube will try to guess what you are trying to find. These guesses are based on actual search phrases typed by countless users before you, which makes those phrases perfect as your keywords. You know people will type them in, so if you use them to optimize your video, it may be found more easily.

Now, ranking in YouTube is awesome and all, but it won’t hurt to get picked up by Google, too. YouTube videos rank really well in Google; it’s not uncommon for them to occupy multiple SERPs before non-video results start appearing. It therefore makes sense to optimize your videos for Google’s search algorithm, too. That’s where you need SEO tools.

Whip out WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions and type in it the keywords you’ve found so far.

You will want to know the keywords’ global search volume. A high search volume means more people can find you by typing those keywords in Google. There’s also local search volume, which is useful when your videos are meant to promote your brand in specific locations (something local businesses do often). Now you have all you need to collect the most potent keywords!

Where to use keywords?

In order to optimize content with keywords, you can strategically place them where they will be noticed by search engines. How do you do it on YouTube? Video optimization begins before you even upload your video on the platform. Here are the places to use YouTube keywords.

• Filename. Optimize the video file’s name with keywords before you upload it.
• Title. This is how users identify what a video is about. Give it an unambiguous name that will leave no doubts about its contents.
• Description. Have you got more to say about the video? You have plenty of room to maneuver here, so knock yourself out! Also, descriptions are the place for information that’s either not important enough to mention in the video or too tricky to include (like links to other sites).
• Tags. They make videos easier to find in search. This section has a character limit of 500, but it should be enough for your keywords.
• Transcript. Be sure to upload one! If you’ve ever seen automatically generated transcripts on YouTube, you know how awful they are. This is a job best done with your own hands.
• Translations. You will get a lot more viewers by translating your transcripts into different languages.
• Spoken content. When talking in your video, say the keywords out loud. If you have properly optimized the video’s title with keywords, say the title out loud within the first 5 seconds. Viewers often stop watching when they aren’t sure what the videos are about; if they hear you talk, they’ll be reassured they’ve found the right thing.
• Location. Fill out this field if you are in need of local SEO.
• Channel and playlists. Keywords go in their names, descriptions and About information.

Once your keywords are in place, the next step is tracking how they help you rank. If you are a proud website owner who also runs a YouTube channel, you can track both Google and YouTube rankings in WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool.

First, open the tool and click on Settings. Then add your keywords in the Keywords tab.

Next, select the Search Engines tab and press the Add a search engine button to choose Google and YouTube.

Lastly, click Save to start scanning. The tool will show how your website ranks in Google and your YouTube channel ranks in YouTube, for each keyword. With this information, you will always know if you should re-optimize your videos.

3. Link building for videos: yes or no?

Do you need to build links to a YouTube video the same way you would to your own site?

The answer is “maybe”. Not a solid “yes”. Just a “maybe”.

Why is that?

For starters, YouTube is already a high-authority domain. There’s no need to build more links to it; that won’t help your video rank higher in YouTube nor in Google. Second, videos need views to rank, and backlinks aren’t as good at bringing views as one would like them to be. If you want views, you should embed the video on other websites instead.

And lastly, the time you spent building links to a video could’ve been spent on making a new video. Or building links to your own site. The point is, link building just isn’t as big in YouTube SEO as it is everywhere else.

That’s not to say links aren’t any good. Links bring traffic, and traffic means views! That extra traffic might just tip the scales in your favor, so build backlinks with gusto. Now, the question is: from where?

1. Sites with user-generated content. Most forums and blogs are accepting of videos, as long as they are relevant to whatever topic is in discussion. Q&A sites like Quora and Reddit qualify, too.

2. Your own website. If you have one, and if you can embed or put a link to your video there, then by all means do so.

3. Email. It’s standard practice to notify subscribers of your updates via email. Such links may not pass any authority whatsoever, but who can say no to more user traffic?

4. Competitor videos’ backlink profiles. You can find out who links to any page on the Internet with WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy. Pick videos from competitor channels, put the URLs in the tool and find websites who might give you backlinks.

And while we are still on this topic, don’t forget you can build links to your website from YouTube. The best place to put a YouTube backlink is a video’s description – specifically above the “read more”, since it’s the most visible part of the description. And while multiple links are allowed in there, keep in mind that users won’t click on them equally.

All links on YouTube are nofollow, by the way.

4. Optimize your video to rank

What else does a video need to rank? Other than keywords, YouTube looks at several more things before ranking its videos. Some of those signals are so easy to understand, even a preschooler could become a YouTube SEO expert. Those are, of course, the signals you can count.

Get as many of these as possible:

1. Video views
2. Comments under the video
3. Subscribes after watching
4. Shares in social media
5. Embeds on other sites
6. Likes (and obviously, dislikes will lower your rankings)

Other signals are trickier as they can’t be so easily measured. Fortunately, a preschooler could still understand what they mean, and so can you. We’ve already talked about user retention in the beginning of this post, now it’s time to discuss this more.

First, there is video length. Videos shorter than 5 minutes tend to not rank as well as longer videos. Understandable: how much content can you cram in under mere 5 minutes? Take your time filming and don’t be stingy.

The other matter is consistent releases. One of the worst things that can happen to your videos is for them and their channel to fall into obscurity. And no video (unless it’s viral) is safe from such a fate. Just think about it: a few days into your video’s lifetime, who will remember it even exists? New videos pop up on YouTube all the time, and even they will be watched and forgotten soon enough. The only way to fight this problem is to regularly update your channel with new videos. By all means, ask viewers to subscribe to your channel and also ask them to click the bell that signifies they want to be notified the next time you publish a video.

5. Maximize your click-through rate

Appearing in search results isn’t enough. A video that gets no clicks is deemed irrelevant and slides down the ranking ladder. You need to make your video’s search result more clickable. But how?

Here’s everything you need to increase a YouTube video’s CTR.

• Exciting title. A video’s title has to make users want to watch it. Your video is the best in the world; show it in its name!
• Engaging description. This needs to act as a follow-up to the title, reinforcing its message and convincing the users to give the video a whirl.
• Excellent thumbnail. This tiny preview picture can make or break your video’s success, so think it over. You can choose a thumbnail in the video settings, but it’s much better to make one yourself. Note that only owners of verified YouTube accounts can create custom thumbnails.
• Efficient tags. This is where you put keywords related to your video, but there’s more you can do. If you want to give your videos more visibility and help them rank higher, put your competitors’ names in your list of tags. That way, when somebody watches competitors’ videos, yours will appear in the “related videos” section.

6. Make your video convert with an end screen

All good things must come to an end. Afterwards, what truly matters is the impact left by them. YouTube videos are no different. When a video ends, the viewers leave, and you don’t want them to leave without making you a little more successful.

The end screen is where you make the last seconds count. Finish your videos like a boss with these final touches:

• Thank your viewers for watching. User experience matters on every website, including YouTube. Goodbyes should be positive and promise more positivity in the future.
• Make a call to action. Encourage viewers to engage with your videos: to subscribe, click the bell, upvote, share and comment. How The Hobbit Should Have Ended has my favorite call to action of all time (skip to 2:50).
• Link to other videos in your channel. This is done with the help of YouTube cards. You can add up to 5 cards to a single video, and please don’t put them anywhere outside of the end screen. We have YouTube advertisements to obstruct the main content.

7. Add Schema markup to your embedded videos

Having a YouTube channel is awesome, but it’s also a good idea to embed your videos on your own site. If you plan doing this, you should definitely get acquainted with Schema markup a.k.a. structured data – an incredibly powerful asset in SEO.

Quick refresher: Schema gives search engines a better understanding of your site’s content. What exactly does “understanding” mean in this context? When a page element is marked up by structured data, it tells the algorithm what exactly it does – and, most importantly, how relevant it is to the user’s search query. And since relevant parts appear in search results, you can’t afford to sleep on Schema. After all, embedded videos are page elements same as everything else.

Keep in mind that you can only use Schema on the videos you embed on your own site, not on YouTube. With that said, what kinds of Schema can you add and how do they help?

Here are but a few examples:

• LIVE badge. Even though it’s common practice to record your streams, people still love watching them live – no doubt thanks to the chat.
• Home activities. Perfect for people with free time on their hands.
• Learning video. Just as good for people from the aforementioned group.
• Key moments. Have you ever seen a video search result in Google with timestamps in it? That’s where they come from.

Consult Google’s Documentation for detailed guidelines on structured data for YouTube videos. Be sure to monitor the updates! Schema gets something new on a regular basis.

And remember to validate your Schema markup code (for example, using Google’s free Rich Results Test). If you release a page with a video and the code doesn’t work, your best outcome is zero change and wasted effort. At worst, you might end up breaking your page.

Afterword

Video content is gaining more popularity with each passing day. YouTube gathered over 80% of global user traffic in 2021, and the trend will continue to grow. That’s a source of traffic you want on your side as soon as possible. The time to learn and apply the best practices in YouTube video SEO is now!

The post YouTube SEO Guide: How to Optimize Videos in 2022 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.