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.

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.

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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.

SEO – search engine optimization – is the practice of getting a website to appear in search engines. Websites want to rank high mostly on Google because it is by far the largest search engine today.

How important is it for your business to rank high there? 60% of clicks on Google’s results pages go to the top three results – that’s how. People searching for information generally only look at the top results and hardly ever scroll down.

When it comes to photography, people use search engines to find a photographer for family photos, pregnancy announcements, wedding photos, or stock photography. Many are interested in finding photographers in a specific area or for a specific purpose.

Google is your friend for getting your business recognized.

SEO can be mysterious in nature because Google is constantly improving its algorithms to find higher quality content. It can seem like a headache to stay on top of the changing algorithms but don’t worry, there are many online SEO guides and tools to help you.

To get started, keep reading to learn about the four areas that most affect photography SEO success.

1. Keyword Research

We all know that a Google search starts with keywords. Keywords drive traffic. Keywords let your leads find you.

This is why keyword research is the starting point for any digital marketing strategy.

Keyword research is a process of brainstorming, researching, and planning what keywords to use in your content.

To begin with, think about client pain points and make a list of keyword ideas.

After brainstorming, it’s time to research those potential keywords. Google Keyword Planner is an excellent starting tool for keyword research. It lets you explore your initial keyword ideas and suggests related search terms with their monthly search volumes. It also allows you to see keyword trends over time.

Other tools, like WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions, can help you execute your keyword research while also giving you more advanced tools like competitive analysis, content research, rank tracking, and more.

After choosing target keywords, it’s time to start crafting useful content, usually in a blog format. Target keywords need to be in your headings, meta descriptions, and content.

At the end of the day, keywords are your vehicle for creating attractive content. High quality content is what drives leads and makes more sales.

2. Local SEO

People looking for photography as a service usually search locally. This is where local SEO comes in for you and your business.

The first step to boosting your SEO success is getting listed on Google My Business. If someone searches “Family Photographer San Diego,” a map with a list of businesses and locations in San Diego appears. This is the easiest and quickest way for someone to find you.

Within your listing, you can add posts to business. This is like a social media post that shows up in your listing. You can add images, information about upcoming events or deals, or share links with other sites. The more content about your business on Google, the better.

Another tip for local SEO is to focus on building a locally optimized landing page. A clear and unique page title with target keywords will garner search engine attention. Don’t forget to clearly identify your area in a positive, exciting, and unique way.

If you have a physical location, like a studio, the address and a map with linked directions should be listed somewhere on the landing page. This helps boost your ranking for local search.

Not convinced? Then see what local SEO can do for your photographer website. You could be there.

When you create content, highlighting the unique strengths of your area and providing testimonials from other locals can be a great way to emphasize your location.

If you run a photography business in multiple locations, consider using submarket landing pages. For example, if you work in Southern California, you can have subpages dedicated to Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, etc. These can all have unique content to grab more traffic.

People who want photography services are most likely to look for photographers near them. This is why your page needs to be optimized for local SEO.

Most importantly, remember to track your website’s rankings in each of your locations. Online SEO tools like WebCEO’s Keyword Rank Tracking can do exactly that: retrieve local rankings from places chosen by the user. Just open the tool’s settings and select your locations in the Search engines tab.

3. On-page Optimization

On-page optimization is what differentiates high-quality sites from spam. Websites today are judged by many on-page ranking factors. Top factors include:

• Useful content
• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Good URL structure
• ALT attributes in your photos
• Keywords in all of the above

Many photographers have strong visuals on their websites but lack written content. To rise to the top rankings, you must have targeted keywords, helpful blog posts, client reviews, and more. This content has to be authentic, beautiful and easy to read, authoritative, and accessible to crawlers.

Title tags are what appear as the clickable title on SERPs. They need to be relevant, clear, and concise to capture attention from Google and visitors. This will be the first impression you give to viewers. Title tags are one of the most deciding factors of whether someone will click on your website or not. Descriptions fulfil the same purpose.

Well-designed URLs are also important. Google and visitors alike are more likely to appreciate a simple URL with a clear and accurate description of the page rather than a long URL with many numbers instead of words.

ALT attributes are of the utmost importance for a photographer website because of all the photos. These tags help Google understand what your photos are about, which in turn helps users find your site in Google image search. Make sure every single one of your photographs has an ALT attribute with keywords!

Make sure you have covered everything by testing your site in WebCEO’s Website Audit.

Not only do you have to worry about these factors, but you have to make sure your site is optimized for mobile devices. Google is now shifting to mobile-first indexing, which means Google will look at your mobile site first to determine how high it wants to rank you.

This can be a challenge for photographers. Most photographers do not want to reduce quality of image size but to be mobile optimized, images have to load fast. Photographers must find the right compression tools to make their site fast for viewers without compromising their quality standards.

As a photographer, you have an eye for what is beautiful and relevant. Apply that to your website, and you will be on the right track.

4. Social Media and SEO

As a photographer, social media can be your best friend because it is a great and free way to display your work, build content, and share your links.

The relationship between social media and SEO is complicated. Google has released contradicting statements on this topic, saying social media does and does not influence ranking. Despite that, it’s still a great way to gain publicity and drive traffic to your website. We do know that Google tracks social media just like it would any other webpage. If someone links to your site from there, that counts as a backlink.

Also, social profiles are often some of the top results on Google. If someone searches your specific business, it is likely that your Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or Instagram accounts would appear in the top results.

Social profiles can be a more personal way for visitors to get to know your brand. They can be more engaging and offer more up-to-date information on your business. If you are travelling and doing photography sessions in different locations, social media can be a more accessible and quick way to update followers.

Once you have a page on every major social channel, you’ll need to track user activity and engagement – on all of them! Can you imagine how difficult and time-consuming it is? Not at all, actually. Not when you have SEO tools to make it quick and easy.

Monitor all your social citations in WebCEO’s Social Engagement Summary report.

Now you know the importance of SEO and the basics for just getting started. For more advanced skills, consider tools that can help you with keyword research, website optimization, and social media management.

The post SEO for Photographers: A Definitive Guide appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

2017 is nearing its end. Soon I’ll have to throw away last year’s Christmas tree and buy a new one. That physical work can wait, however, as for now, we should use what little brainpower remains in our heads before we can let them recharge over the holidays.

With the changing of yet another year, now is one of the best times to ponder the latest SEO trends. There are reasons to suspect 2018 will take us in certain new directions and some of our working principles will be reinforced. What SEO trends and techniques does 2018 hold for us? Let’s sneak a peek into the very near future and brace ourselves for it.

1. Voice search

Voice search makes up 20% of all online searches. By 2020, this number may very well reach 50%. We are standing on the precipice of a new era on the Internet, which means new things for would-be SEO experts like you and me to learn and master. The future is so unforgiving!

Optimization for voice search might require some getting used to because it’s different from your orthodox way of Googling things. Instead of disjointed words and incomplete phrases, users tend to speak using actual, proper questions which search algorithms will have to work with. In other words, you’ll need to start optimizing websites for this new species of ‘voice keywords’. Picture long-tail keywords, except with a head that comes in one of six different shapes (“who”, “what”, “where”, “when”, “why”, “how”) and a tail bent like a question mark. Those are voice keywords.

Get creative with variations of questions and look them all up in WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool. The number of global and local searches for the keyword of your choice will tell you how competitive it is (you may not want it to be too competitive). And of course, don’t forget to follow up questions with valid, detailed answers so the Google app can read them out loud.

2. Even better user experience

As always, Google will favor websites that provide users with a nice, engaging experience. Conversely, the websites that fail to deliver will see a drop in rankings instead. As the quality of websites rises worldwide, user expectations will keep rising too, so be careful not to fall behind!

Using Google Analytics to monitor user behavior on your site, you can get an idea about how much they enjoy it. A high bounce rate may indicate that you might need to change something. You can improve the UX on your site by increasing its loading speed, making its design user-friendly, tending to technical issues and, of course, creating the best content for your visitors.

Keep an eye on your incoming traffic in WebCEO’s Web Analytics. If you notice that it has dropped overall or regarding some sources, it may be a sign that things have gone south and need improvement. A small leak can sink a great ship; don’t let this happen to you!

3. SEO-friendly content of the most interest to visitors

Content will continue to be one of the prevalent ranking factors. However, Google hates stagnation. Their policy is to give users the best the Internet has to offer, so the standards for what content counts as good are bound to rise again in the new year.

The best way to outdo the competitor websites now occupying page one is to, well, outdo them. Help your visitors better than those sites do. Content that gives users what they need, gives them answers and helps them solve their problems is the kind that Google values the most. Here’s a good analogy that comes to mind. If you want to beat athletes in a sports competition, train your body to rival theirs; if you want to beat websites to page one, create content to rival theirs. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

And of course, your content should be optimized for search engines. That means placing keywords moderately in all the right places:

• title tag
• meta description tag
• H1-H4 tags
• Image names and alt tags
• Text

Last but not least, consider diversifying your content with LSI keywords that are semantically related to the main keywords you use. It gives search engines a better understanding of what you are about.

4. More caution while building links

Businesses know the value of inbound links. Just look at SEO statistics: 20% of businesses dedicate over 50% of their overall SEO budget to link building. Backlinks are among the most powerful ranking factors and will remain so in 2018.

However, we may need to be extra careful about how we obtain them. Earlier in May, Google noticed an increase in spammy links from guest blogging and will likely keep a watchful eye on any guest contributions in the future. If we are lucky, we might see the birth of a new way to get on Google’s bad side – always a welcome change!

Of course, it doesn’t mean a farewell to guest blogging. You’ll just have to keep it within the limits of what’s allowed and not let it hurt your brand’s reputation (be sure the guest post you publish doesn’t have more than one link going to sites he or she wants to promote). Instead of picking a single method of gaining links and milking it until Google comes after you, spread out and get links from many sources (why not peek at your competitors’ backlink profiles for a start?). Google will appreciate such a link building strategy a lot more.

Be sure not to let any bad apples sneak into your basket of backlinks. Weed them out and keep your profile clean with WebCEO’s Toxic Links tool.

5. Seizing Position 0

Google is determined to make speed a factor in giving users the information they need. That’s why there’s so much extra fluff on page one: quick answers, carousels, “people also ask”… They are shown above the highest ranking results, this being the reason why their space is called “position zero” – which is de facto the new position one. If your site is already on the first page, it opens up a possibility to claim a spot at position zero, too.

To make it happen, use Schema code when you build your site. Since resulting featured snippets tend to provide answers to “who”, “what”, “when”, “where” and “how” types of questions, it predisposes them to be voice search material. Optimize for one, get one more for free!

6. Improving your click-through rate to compete against Position 0

Fight for and against position zero at the same time? Yes, you read that right.

Position zero offers a lot of room for all those ads and featured snippets. However, it causes problems for organic search results: they get buried under all the fluff and sometimes even pushed down below the fold. If you don’t occupy position zero yourself, your site can be pretty hard to find even if you are on Google’s first page at position #1. The competition is stark… but fortunately, not impossible to beat.

So the goal is to make your site more clickable in search results. Make it more attractive to users, so much that all those quickly available answers seem like low-hanging fruit in comparison. Here are a few helpful tips:

• Optimize your page titles and descriptions. Don’t make them so long that they get cut off when displayed in SERPs (and with WebCEO’s On-Site Issues Overview tool, you’ll always know when that happens). Have keywords in them, but also consider using power words that invoke emotion (e.g. “amazing”, “best”, “proven”) and promise quick solutions (“fast delivery”, “24/7”, “now”).
• Optimize the URLs. A string of random letters and numbers at the end of a URL looks messy. On the other hand, a readable URL, which describes what the page is about, is much more likely to catch the users’ attention and earn their trust in your content.
• Use numbered lists in your content, as well as numbers in titles. A research by Conductor found that numbers increase CTR by 36%; clearly, users see something in them. Magic numbers work because people believe.
• Use schema markup on your site. Extra HTML code on your pages turns into extra bits of information next to your site’s link in search results. That way, it looks more credible and just prettier in general (read: clickable).

7. Local SEO

For business owners, Position 0 is the most convenient place to be in search results. Featured snippets are like billboards: big letters, bright logo, address and phone number, a couple reviews as a bonus – all covering a large chunk of the screen and shamelessly in your face. Absolutely worth fighting for, too.

Of course, there’s more to local SEO than getting featured in snippets. You’ll need to submit your website on Google My Business and relevant business directories, optimize it for mobile devices, use location-specific keywords, include NAP citations on your and other sites; and if you are deft enough to create expert content that resonates with your target audience and shows them you aren’t new to what you do, that’s a massive bonus.

8. PPC in addition to SEO

Featured snippets aren’t the only thing stealing the users’ attention from organic results. There are pay-per-click ads, too.

Look at that page, so beautifully infested with ads. Hopefully their number won’t increase in 2018 as the space above the fold isn’t getting any bigger. How would it feel to finally rank number one and still be unnoticed thanks to paid ads and Google Maps? Almost beats the purpose of SEO, doesn’t it?

Of course, it depends on the search query. Plenty of them return organic results right away, making your site easier to find if it’s at the top organically. If PPC results are in the way, though, then you have two ways of dealing with this barrier: either try to rank for different keywords or embrace PPC. Google has the best of intentions when it shows them first, after all.

9. Monitoring and improving conversion rates

When your keywords are ranking higher than they did yesterday, it’s always a delight. This can be compared only to watching your conversion rates grow. To have an adequate image of how well your pages convert, you will need to attach UTM tracking code to each of your major links and watch everything closely in Google Analytics. That’s one part of the mosaic, now onto the next.

Heat map generators have proven to be a powerful asset in optimizing websites (we can attest to that). Tools for observing user behavior on-page are exactly what’s needed to complement rankings and GA statistics. You can look at a heat map and immediately see the weak spots in your site’s design. Maybe your calls-to-action don’t get enough clicks simply because they go unnoticed! They could be below the fold, or they don’t even look like something people are supposed to click on, or maybe they just aren’t actionable enough and need some extra oomph.

Keep in mind that no tool can solve problems with your conversion – that’s still up to you. But it can quickly point you in the right direction and save you a lot of time.

10. Fast and responsive mobile-friendly sites

The reign of mobile devices promises to be long and prosperous. They are here to stay, and be loved, and drive even more traffic to websites than they already are. I doubt large screens will ever go obsolete, but I can guarantee we’ll see more and more small screens in the future. With such a variety of sizes in place, it will be an obvious necessity to make websites look good on every kind of display.

There’s also the mobile-first index to take into account. It’s going to play a new, vital role in ranking websites. Once it’s out, they will be ranked depending on the user experience provided by their mobile versions. Not having a mobile version means not being indexed – a disaster for your SEO.

Therefore, give your website a responsive design and make it load as fast as possible. WebCEO’s Mobile Optimization tool will test your website’s mobile-friendliness and give you tips for improving on it, while the Page Speed tool will give you even more tips for – surprise! – speeding it up.

11. Accelerated Mobile Pages

A high loading speed is a fantastic thing in general, not just for mobile-friendly sites. Users are less likely to lose patience and more eager to stick around and lurk deeper instead. It’s a ranking factor for Google, too. Can you come up with a reason not to make your site load fast? If yes, please let me know, it’ll be great prank material.

In 2015, Google launched the Accelerated Mobile Pages project, and it’s been a great help for webmasters who want to speed their sites up. An AMP page is very light on code: a bare minimum of HTML, optional use of CSS, and no Javascript at all. Less code equals less work for browsers, thus a page made in this manner loads in the blink of an eye. If your site has pages that function without code that’s excessive by AMP standards, consider AMPing them up.

12. Image optimization for a new, powerful visual search

Most search engines have an image search function, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who believes it’s perfect. However, search engines are both able and willing to improve it, as evidenced by the steps they have made towards upgrading their visual search capabilities. Google Lens and Pinterest Lens are both capable of coming up with results based on as little as a photo of any random thing in your vicinity. That’s two more unique “search engines” to optimize for in the near future.

And while I mention Pinterest, consider making your images shareable on social media. That’s more exposure for you and potential backlinks pointing to your site. Remember that likes and shares and comments on social media posts that link to you will count for SEO purposes as backlinks.

13. Moving to HTTPS and leave HTTP behind

I’m surprised how many websites still haven’t done this. Google approves of secure connections and made them a lightweight ranking factor back in 2014. They went as far as to mark HTTP sites as non-secure in Chrome, scaring users away when they see this. Is your site still HTTP? Then your rankings aren’t as high as they could be.

14. Earning your audience’s trust through brand building

The majority of users don’t like looking past Google’s page one. If something isn’t there, it doesn’t exist to them. Does this mean your site will definitely start getting clicks once it makes it there? Not necessarily, as there are still other options on the same page. But your chances would improve greatly if your brand was more recognizable.

Brand building is an essential part of any long-term SEO strategy. It should be a part of yours, as well, if you intend to keep your site around for a long time. Content, products, service or what-have-you – put effort into giving the best to others and earn a good reputation in return. Social media is as great a place as ever for interacting with your audience for feedback and closer ties. And of course, keep track of your brand’s mentions online so that displeased words don’t escape your attention. WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring tool will make sure that no negative remarks puncture a hole in the SEO balloon that’s meant to take you to the top.

The more people know you, and the more good things they know and say about you, the better for your business goals. Work to earn their trust.

15. Video content to be even more popular

The Internet is crazy about video content. A study by Hubspot indicated that 45% of users watch at least an hour worth of YouTube and Facebook videos weekly. What’s more, videos are expected to hog a staggering 80% of all online traffic by the early 2020s. If you still aren’t using YouTube and other video hosting platforms to build brand awareness and attract visitors, then make your debut now and start 2018 off with a bang. When the 2020s hit, you’ll be riding that gigantic tide of traffic.

Meanwhile in the present, YouTube has already become so big that people search for things there without turning to Google at all. Not wanting to be outdone, Google includes YouTube videos in its search results, and it’s not uncommon to see them on page one. In other words, you can make two powerful figures fight over you – morally questionable if they were people, but perfectly fine when they are search engines.

And since video content is so well-liked, you have options other than YouTube. You can simply embed videos directly on your site and make users spend more time on it – yet another reason for Google to rank your site higher.

And the most important advice of all: it will be an absolute must to use powerful SEO tools. Your campaign depends on your ability to measure progress and detect issues before they cause lasting damage. If there is one thing that will be the same in the new year, it’s WebCEO’s readiness to give you its full support!

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Brave the Future, Tame the Trends!

The post 15 Leading SEO Trends for 2018 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

RankBrain represents one of the most intriguing changes in the world of SEO in the last year. Initially introduced in October 2015, it still remains a mystery for most experts. However, due to numerous studies performed since then, we are able to understand some basics features of this machine learning system.

Even though the name may imply otherwise, its priority is to provide more relevant results to searches that are completely new. After initial trials, people from Google realized that this system is actually great when dealing with ambiguous and poorly defined queries as well as natural language.

History of RankBrain

Have in mind that this is not Google’s first attempt to implement machine learning into their systems. Previously, we could see a similar technology in Google AdWords. Whenever RankBrain needs to assess a page, it focuses on the relevancy of the page itself, similarly to the Google AdWords Quality Score. Based on this score, it places different pages on different positions. Have in mind that the Google AdWords Quality Score doesn’t use external signals such as links. At this point, we are not certain whether RankBrain relies on links when judging content. Also, this system has some similarities with Word2Vec.

Word2Vec was based on a technology called skip-gram and a continuous bag of words. These two models allowed a system to establish a relationship between main words and all neighboring words. Also, Word2Vec was able to embed words into vectors which allowed them to be better understood.

RankBrain works similarly. It is pretty good at establishing semantic relationships and reading user intent. Based on this, we can surmise that RankBrain is at least partially based on Word2Vec technology.

Why was RankBrain introduced in the first place?

There are about 3 billion searches every day. Out of these 3 billion, 15 % are completely unique, never seen before. This amounts to 450 million. RankBrain was invented in order to process these unique queries and give a proper answer to them. The system does this by making an educated guess. Based on all previously accumulated information, it is able to make semantic connections and establish a user’s intent. But, in some cases, even with all its advanced technology backing it up, RankBrain can make a mistake and provide a final user with results that he is not looking for. If that is the case, it will provide a new set of results, hopefully satisfying the individual. This is why it is called machine learning. RankBrain is able to constantly refine its results and improve its suggestions.

Many people think that RankBrain is an artificial intelligence system. This is not the case. It is a machine learning system able to improve itself without any human interference. Through advancement, RankBrain could one day reach the state of “artificial intelligence,” but, there are still too many limitations for this to happen. Google product managers seem to have realized that RankBrain is excellent when dealing with ambiguous and long-tail keywords. Unlike before, when Google would focus on one word within the phrase, RankBrain is able to understand the meaning behind the words and give proper suggestions.

Relationship with Hummingbird

There are many misconceptions when it comes to Hummingbird and RankBrain. The latter is not an algorithm nor does it replace Hummingbird. In fact, these two are separate entities that are meant to work in conjunction. Experts refer to RankBrain as Hummingbird’s modification. Most likely, when processing a query, RankBrain finishes its part of the job and then Hummingbird additionally refines it.

Similarly to Word2Vec and Google AdWords, it is possible that Google took the best out of Hummingbird and implemented it within RankBrain. At this point, we can only speculate. The fact is that Google is very protective of its technology and all we can do at this point is notice similarities and differences between various systems.

RankBrain as the Wild Card of the Google Ranking System

Google has announced that RankBrain has become the number three ranking signal in the short period of its existence. But, there are many questions regarding it. Unlike other ranking signals (more than 200 of them), RankBrain most likely doesn’t represent a direct signal. Instead, it affects the way Google perceives queries and through it, search as a whole. RankBrain is not static. It is constantly improving and refining queries according to its own perception. Additionally, unlike other ranking signals, RankBrain is completely autonomous, able to work without any human interference.

But, keep in mind that this machine learning system still has limited use. It was primarily created in order to help users with unique queries. And to be fair, it is doing a great job. This means that RankBrain will not interfere if there are already valid suggestions available. Perhaps this is the reason why it is only at position three when it comes to ranking signal importance. We have learned that RankBrain can also help out with other long-tail queries, ambiguous keywords and slang. The system will not interfere when there is sufficient data for a query (at least the way we understand).

Nevertheless, this raises some questions. If RankBrain has managed to gain so much importance in so little time, it is quite possible that it will continue increasing in relevance eventually taking over common queries. This could change the whole SEO world.

How Does RankBrain Work?

As we mentioned previously, RankBrain has to embed words into vectors so it can use them properly. After that, all these vectors are put into the same virtual space. This includes all semantically related words that help the system establish relationships. Here is a good example:

In order to weigh the words properly, RankBrain has to understand correlations between them. Some of these semantically close keywords will have more impact on the query while other will have less impact. The importance of a keyword is established based on its distance from the main word. Related keywords that are far away from the main keyword have less importance on the query while those that are close to it, have more importance. Based on this, RankBrain gives priority to different content.

But, that is not all. This is only the part of the equation, the part which we know about. There is probably much more to it given that RankBrain is able to provide answers to some poorly defined questions and other queries that previously presented a problem.

How do you optimize for RankBrain?

At this point in time, there is no point in optimizing for it. Simply put, these queries have too small of a volume for us to bother with them. However, if one day RankBrain takes over a larger chunk of the queries, we should start considering it. Anyway, your main SEO strategy should remain the same; you have to have great content that will attract clicks and make visitors read it. If one day RankBrain becomes the dominant element of Google search, we will have to forget about link building. Instead of off-page, we will have to concentrate more on on-page optimization.

RankBrain works through trials and error. Even though the system performs its own analysis before presenting results to users, that doesn’t mean that users will be satisfied with suggestions. In order for your copy to be successful and to properly optimize it for RankBrain, you will have to focus on things such as click through rate, time spent on page and bounce rate.

According to our presumptions, these statistics are the best measure of visitor satisfaction with a page and at the same time, they send a strong signal to RankBrain regarding relevance. So, if you wish to optimize a page for RankBrain these are our suggestions:

• Create compelling titles and meta descriptions
• Write longer copy
• Include authoritative resources and studies within the text
• Be direct and focus on the user’s benefit
• Make your website responsive

WebCEO’s SEO Content Assistant can help optimize your content to match RankBrain’s preferences, guiding you in crafting relevant content that resonates with your audience and RankBrain’s understanding of relevance.

Have in mind that your article still has to be somewhat important to the query. If it isn’t, RankBrain will not suggest it to a user in the first place. But, if it does, try and make the best out of it, because RankBrain will notice how the customer reacts.

In the future, a visitor will be the one that determines whether a website lives or dies. In that regard, be sure to provide maximum value and the freshest, most relevant information.

Examples of RankBrain

Here is one of the more popular examples of RankBrain in action:

We used the query “What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain”. This can be seen as quite an ambiguous query. You might think that Google would answer the query by presenting websites about production, shopping malls, food chains, human as a consumer, prices etc. However, this query is clearly connected to language commonly used in biology textbooks and specifically, the word “highest level” would clearly refer to “predators.” By using its database, RankBrain is able to make a good guess and return results connected to this particular topic.

As it turns out, RankBrain is also good at giving results based on our own browser history and previous searches. Let us use an example with Barack Obama.

In order to get Barack Obama’s age, we can type “How old is President Obama?” Google can easily recognize what we are looking for giving us data on Barack Obama. However, after this query, if we type “How old is his wife?” Google may understand that we are looking for data about Michelle Obama based on our history.

Conclusion

At this point, there are simply too many unknowns. We still cannot properly assess RankBrain or its true potential. It has shown great results so far but that doesn’t mean that Google will give it a greater role than it currently has. One thing is for sure. As always, Google is trying to improve the user experience and create new technologies that will help users get the most relevant results to their queries. In terms of SEO, things may or may not change in the future. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Even if they do change, Google will still be based on a certain technology, technology that can be exploited and optimized for. With this in mind, if you are working within SEO, there is no reason to be concerned.

For tracking how your site’s rankings are affected by RankBrain and other factors, use WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool. Check your website positions on desktop, smartphone and tablet: the results may differ dramatically!

Additionally, to ensure your SEO strategies are comprehensive and up-to-date, explore WebCEO’s Online SEO tools to cover all your bases from on-page optimization to backlink analysis.

The post RankBrain – the Wild Card of the Google Search Ranking System appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

I am not going to talk about Panda, Penguin and even Platypus!

This post is about us SEO workers who work diligently to make our sites visible and usable, who monitors every Google Update change and fine-tune sites to comply with Google guidelines.

If you do not recognize yourself among the following SEO beasts, feel free to add your own description. I’ll be happy to update the post and I promise to link to your site (we are all sharks at SEO ).

SEO Foxes

SEO Foxes are people who can apply insights from several fields: they can gain insight simply by chatting with the barista in their favorite café.  They come to SEO from any background. I know one SEO fox with an English literature degree.

SEO foxes bring a diverse set of experience and an ability to adapt to new circumstances easily.  They are curious and always ready to experiment, they trust only data they’ve verified themselves. People with a foxy style always bring new ideas and they smell genius solutions like a fox!

For SEO foxes looking to harness their ability to experiment with new SEO strategies, WebCEO’s Online SEO tools can provide a wide array of resources to test their innovative ideas.

SEO Ants

SEO ants have years of experience, they’ve gained deep knowledge in SEO through years of experience. Usually you can find SEO ants among in-house SEOs. They’ve gone through the SEO process millions of times and they’ve tried every SEO technique known (and even invented a few new ones).

SEO ants are great at solving one set of problems or delivering one set of outcomes in a pinch. If you are an SEO ant, try to apply your wonderful SEO knowledge to a new site or start a blog, because you have a lot to teach newbies.

 SEO Unicorns

Everybody has heard these creatures exist but nobody has seen them. SEO unicorns can easily move any site to the top and speak about it at the next big conference, inspiring us with their incredible wit and tact.

SEO unicorns can turn a client into your brand evangelist, they can create content that is viral, they get links while they sleep and their site rankings grow all the time. I have a strong suspicion they’ve sold their souls to Google.

If you have a person who generates working SEO solutions and it feels like Google informs him/her about all feature update, you can be glad because this means there’s an SEO unicorn on your team.

Who is missing? Feel free to add.

The post SEO Bestiary: What Kind Are You? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Thanks to the questions our Web CEO Support Angels field every day, we have a great source of user generated content for our blog.

For those who often hear about URL redirects, such as 301s and 302s, but don’t fully understand what they are and what they are needed for, we want to clear a few things up.

URL redirects cause a requested page or domain to automatically send users and search engines to another page or server.  There are many types and ways of redirecting your content from an old server location to a new one.  It mainly depends on what programming language the website is written in, what path for redirects you use (server-sided or client-sided) and what the purpose of a URL redirection is.  Be aware that any incorrect move of your content from one URL to another may cause visitor traffic loss and even a temporary drop of your search engine rankings.  Improper redirect generation is like moving to a new place while leaving all your things where you lived before.  But sometimes you have no other option but to change an old cubbyhole for your content to a new and better one with all the page or domain authority and link juice transferred to a new URL.

What are the most common reasons for URL redirection?

From an SEO perspective you would rather not use URL redirects, but there are still reasonable excuses for redirects.

1. To consolidate two versions of your site (www.domain.com and domain.com) with the help of a canonical redirect.
2. To get rid of duplicate content issues by redirecting one page to the other.
3. To redirect from an old website domain to a new, more marketable one.
4. To direct people from a 404 page “not found” to an existing relevant page.

What is the most SEO recommended URL redirect type?

In most cases you can generate a URL redirection in two ways: at the server (HTTP) level and at the HTML source level.  HTML or client-sided redirects usually cause technical SEO issues like slow response time and page speed. From an SEO perspective, the server-sided redirects are preferable, because they are much quicker and can be cached by a browser.

SEO experts and Google Webmaster guidelines suggest using search engine friendly 301 permanent redirects created at the server level, because it is the safest way to quickly direct search engines and users to your content’s new location and save any accrued SEO benefits. Temporary redirects (including 302s, 303s and 307s) are not good for your SEO at all. You should avoid these as much as possible or use them only briefly.

4 free SEO tools to check your redirect quality

If you have multiple redirects on your website, you should keep track of their status on a regular basis. You can get into big SEO trouble if some of your redirects work slowly, are configured incorrectly and mislead your users and search engine bots.

Redirect Checker by Small SEO Tools will help you to check the HTTP headers of your pages with the extraction of the HTTP status code in order to check for valid 301 redirects.

Redirect Path Checker is a helpful Chrome Extension that quickly identifies redirect paths and checks them for potential errors that may have slipped through your fingers.

If you don’t know how to generate 301 URL redirects and don’t have any webmaster to help you, you can use this Redirect Generator tool from Rapidtables.

With multiple redirects on your site, you will need to run a complex WebCEO Online SEO audit in order to detect and fix any technical issues and page speed problems on your site. In the ideal world you should avoid redirects if at all possible, or reduce the number of redirects to a minimum.

The post URL Redirects: Finding a Better Place for Your Content appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

The beauty of SEO campaigns is that they can be run from anywhere. You don’t need a huge office space to house all your employees.

You can outsource the bulk of the work to freelancers. If you’re in the market for an excellent SEO campaign, there are seven types of freelancers that can support your effort.

1. Writers

Content marketing is a major piece of an SEO campaign, and unless you have endless time on your hands and plenty of talent, it’s just not possible without freelance writers. They pose several advantages that an in-house writer cannot, such as reduced overhead, since freelance writers are generally paid on commission or by the hour rather than on salary with benefits.

Some companies choose to order all their content from content mills, which is certainly an affordable option. However, the material from content mills is often riddled with errors, duplicates information from elsewhere, and therefore appears on multiple websites throughout the Internet, which is not good for your overall strategy.

An excellent freelance writer ensures high quality content at an affordable price. It’s not that difficult to find good writers and other dependable freelancers on freelance marketplaces.

2. Web designers and programmers

If you want to drive conversions once you’ve drawn customers to your website, you’ll need to have a well-designed, easily navigable, and highly functional website. By hiring a freelance web designer and programmer, you can have the stylish, easy-to-use website that does the job without killing your budget.

These professionals can design your website from the ground up, and then you can keep them on retainer in case you run into any bugs. When it’s time to update the site, give them another call and they’ll take care of the necessary upgrades.

3. IT professionals

Having an IT professional at your disposal is the best way to ensure that your online operation will stay up and running no matter what. They can answer general tech questions as well as fix small and large technological glitches as they occur, which they inevitably will.

Small businesses and startups have an especially difficult time harnessing their own freelance department, so an IT freelancer will likely be your best option. When you’re looking for an IT freelancer, check to see if the person is collaboration certified, which means that he or she has the expertise to work with your collaborative software and specific technical needs.

4. Project managers

Chances are you have more projects in your current SEO campaign than you can handle. Delegate some of those responsibilities to an independently contracted project manager.

This type of freelancer has a unique skill set that encompasses organization, leadership, and communication. He or she can take the specifics of your project and work with your team of freelancers, and even in-house employees, to improve overall efficiencies and productivity. 

5. Web analysts

A major element of getting ahead of the competition in SEO is being able to monitor web traffic, for both you and your competitor. It’s a major task that could easily take up all your precious time if you let it.

So it’s a good idea to outsource this activity to a professional who specializes in monitoring web data and analytics. Such people can help you stay effectively ahead of the competition, and report back to you about what changes you need to make. It’s a far more efficient and accurate way of monitoring web traffic.

6. Social media specialists

Social media engagement is another SEO task that requires near-constant attention. In Internet time, if you don’t respond to activity on certain social media sites within two hours, you can be viewed as a negligent business.

Delegate this time-consuming responsibility to a professional who can handle the constant demand for social interaction. This person can also help you monitor your social strategies and improve them as you go.

7. Graphic designers

Content creation involves more forms than just prose. Graphic design contractors can make videos, infographics, memes, and more to boost your social campaign.

Consumers respond extremely well to visual content, so having a graphic designer on hand could make all the difference between content that’s shared hundreds of times and content that gets no attention and garners no feedback.

As supplementary to human resources there are free and paid digital marketing tools that can increase the effectiveness of your SEO and marketing campaigns and bring your brand on an industry level.

Don’t make your SEO campaign any harder than it needs to be. Call in the expertise you need to accomplish the necessary work while improving your bottom line.

The post 7 Freelancers Every SEO Campaign Should Use appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Happy Halloween our dear SEOs!

All Hallow’s Eve is destined to bring a lot of frightening fun. With all those jack-o’-lanterns, trick-or-treating and dressing up in freaky costumes, being an SEO you should keep your eyes open. This year SEO Halloween is accompanied by a real SEOmbie Apocalypse. Yes, you heard me right! If you run an online business, the SEOmbie Apocalipse may come to you as well. Horrible SEOmbie monsters like a shambling Panda, a crawling Penguin, a peaky Hummingbird and a spooky Pigeon are crawling in pursuit of your site rankings’ freshness and your traffic savor. Are you equipped enough to protect your site against SEO-mbie attacks? We have prepared the SEOmbie Survival Guide for you to stay BOO-tiful and keep your site safe.

Moreover, you can use WebCEO’s Website Audit tool to fend off these ghastly creatures by keeping your site’s SEO health in top condition.

The post How to Survive the SEO-mbie Apocalypse With the WebCEO Survival Guide appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.