Everybody loves a quick-loading site. A user who doesn’t have to wait is so much more likely to become a customer; it’s a proven fact that site speed optimization positively affects conversions. And now that Google has announced their decision to include page load time into their list of ranking factors, it has become an integral part of SEO.

What is a good loading time? “The lower, the better” sounds like an obvious answer, but it doesn’t translate well into seconds. Let’s look at some hard numbers to be sure.

• Google recommends 3 seconds maximum. Data shows most sites are still very far from this, although they keep improving.
• As page load time goes from 1 second to 5 seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 90%. Naturally, it’s even higher for longer load times.
• Currently, the majority of mobile landing pages take 7 seconds on average to load all their content.

I can only imagine the shift in site rankings all over the Internet once loading speed officially sets in as a ranking factor. It might just become another Mobilegeddon! Don’t wait until disaster strikes. Website optimization obviously implies maxing out your site’s speed, so if you want to know how to make web pages load faster, you can start working on it right away!

1. Use browser caching efficiently

Browsers can store loaded page elements in the cache and retrieve them from there when you visit the page later. Doing so saves browsers the time they’d otherwise spend loading the elements again. In other words, a cached page loads faster.

If you have a static website, you can define what page elements to cache in the .htaccess file. Remember to set the expiration times for them, as well. Your file will look something like this:

But that’s just the beginning. Enabling the cache isn’t enough to make your website load faster; you need to be smart at using it, too. How can you make the most out of browser caching?

• Make your redirects cacheable. Redirects are bad for loading speed, but sometimes they are a necessary evil. When getting rid of them isn’t an option, make sure they can at least be added in the cache.
• Use the same URL for a resource that is used often. When you link to the same resource multiple times – whether on the same page or across many pages – it’s best to use the same URL for it. This applies to hyperlinks, redirects and links for loading objects onto the page, such as images. Why is one URL better than several different ones? Because cache can’t tell if different URLs point to the same thing; they will all be cached separately. If you are consistent instead, there will be fewer resources to put in the cache, and browsers will be able to load them faster.
• Avoid using query strings in static URLs. Links with “?” in them cannot be cached. Save queries for dynamic URLs.

2. Make pages work with fewer elements

Using more elements than you need slows pages down. It’s obvious why: elements need to be parsed and generated, so a page that shows little and does little loads much faster than a cluttered one. This goes both for objects you can see on the screen (e.g. images and buttons) and invisible things that operate behind the scenes (such as scripts). Proper web page optimization means making pages do their job with as few separate resources as you can manage.

As a logical follow-up from the above point, combine elements where possible. If you see an opportunity to merge separate elements into one, take it: the page will have fewer requests to process and will load faster. Examples of content you can merge: images, CSS files, Javascript files.

3. Compress your site’s files

You can make your website load faster by compressing its files with Gzip. The smaller your files, the less time is needed to process and load them in the browser. HTML and CSS files compress especially well since they tend to have plenty of repeating code.

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

4. Optimize the pages’ code

In order to display a web page, your browser needs to parse its code first. Obviously, a page with more code takes more time to load. The opposite is true as well: if you remove all excessive code and make it as simplified as possible, you can reduce the page’s loading time. A good example of this practice are accelerated mobile pages (AMP): due to minimization of HTML and CSS code and total lack of Javascript, pages optimized in this way load almost instantaneously.

Clever placement of the code is another way to optimize website speed. Put your CSS code at the top of the page and Javascript at the bottom. This will ensure the page will be rendered as soon as it starts loading and won’t be slowed down by a faulty script.

5. Optimize your images

Here’s another major part of web page optimization. Pictures take the biggest toll on page loading time, and sites tend to have a lot of them. It’s therefore crucial to reduce their file size as much as possible – while remembering to preserve their quality, of course. Here’s what you can do:

• Pick the right height and width. An image that’s bigger than it needs to be just takes up extra space. Size it the way you want it displayed.
• Pick the most optimal format. Try saving the same image in various formats, and you’ll notice the copies will have different file sizes. Choose the one that yields the smallest result.
• Compress images. Files made in graphics editors tend to be too big for their own good. Use software and online services to compress images. You’ll be surprised how many kilobytes they can shave off with no impact on the quality.

There’s one more thing to do with images that can speed up website load time: specify their height and width in the <img> tag. That way, the browser will allot space for images before they are loaded. If you don’t specify the dimensions, the browser will spend some time pushing elements around to make room for images after the rest of the page is loaded, which makes it look to the users like the page isn’t ready yet.

6. Host your site on a fast server

Webmasters who need to host their sites somewhere have plenty of options, but are often budget-restricted. Thus they settle for the cheapest and slowest hosting server with shared resources. A dedicated server is the best possible option where website speed is concerned (but also the most expensive), while a virtual private server (or VPS) is the middle ground. Choose what you can afford and make it run as fast as it can.

Another great way to speed up a website is to host it on a content delivery network (or CDN). A single server has only so much speed to offer; combine several of them into a network, and together they are much more efficient at providing content without delay.

7. Host big files on external platforms

If you use elements with a big file size, such as videos, it’s best not to host them on your own site. If you do, it may be slowed down significantly when a large number of users try to view such content at the same time. Leave it to external platforms instead. Video hosting sites like YouTube and Vimeo were made specifically to handle nigh-unlimited amounts of user requests.

Look up the platforms that specialize in hosting your heaviest content and use them as a crutch for your site.

8. Leverage lazy loading

Browsers normally load images as they parse web pages, and it adds to the loading time. However, there are plugins that save time by tweaking this process. They prevent browsers from loading images until the user scrolls on their position on the page. Depending on how you place your images, they may be loaded individually from each other or even not at all, which increases website speed considerably.

This trick is called lazy loading and is most often used in WordPress SEO by websites made on this platform.

9. Optimize your Core Web Vitals

In 2021, Google implemented a new ranking factor – or rather, a bunch of several factors collectively named Core Web Vitals. They evaluate a page based on how quickly it loads and responds to user input.

These factors are:

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). It measures how much a page’s layout shifts as new elements load and appear on the screen.
• First Input Delay (FID). It represents the delay between the user’s first input and the page’s response.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). It shows how much time it took for the largest element on the page to load.

Since all of these factors are speed-related, you want to keep them as low as possible.

You can check your website’s Core Web Vitals in WebCEO’s Speed Optimization report.

Bonus factor: user’s hardware

Everything works faster on a powerful computer. That includes browsers whose job is to load web pages. A site that’s quick to load on one device might take longer on an inferior one. Such contradicting results may affect your judgment of your site’s performance, so be mindful. Just because it works well on your computer, it doesn’t mean it’s the same for everyone else!

Fortunately, more powerful computers are produced all the time, and people are actively encouraged to buy them and fully experience the digital age. At least consumerism is good for one thing.

10. Test your site’s speed regularly

Site speed optimization cannot be complete without SEO tools. How will you know your site’s loading speed without measuring it? The only way to ensure it’s fast enough is to run SEO audits on your site.

Test your landing pages in WebCEO’s Speed Optimization to see the fruits of your website optimization. The tool will rate the pages’ speed on a scale from 0 to 100, as well as give helpful tips about further reducing their load time. If the score is low or suddenly drops after a few audits, that will be your signal to action.

The post Website Speed Optimization: From 0 to 100 in 10 Fast Steps appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

All websites require a maintenance check and a performance analysis every now and then. Our very own WebCEO.com is no exception. And while our online SEO suite is great at doing technical and SEO audits, there are other issues it cannot address: for example, the quality of a site’s design. Does it provide users with a satisfying experience? Is there any chance it prevents them from doing their business? What if the conversion rates aren’t as high as they could be because the design could use some work? Those aren’t questions we can answer by using our own software; we have to rely on different tools instead, like an online heat map generator.

That’s where Crazy Egg comes in.

What is Crazy Egg? It’s a tool that monitors user activity on your website. Whether hundreds, thousands or millions of people visit your site every day, Crazy Egg keeps track of their activity – specifically of what they do with their computer mouses (or whatever substitute they use). Then it presents the data it has gathered in the form of a heat map.

Why would you want to know who clicks or scrolls where?

• Maybe your visitors don’t click on the things you want them to click.
• Maybe they click on things you’d never expect anyone to click on.
• Or maybe they never find things they are supposed to use!

And then you get landing pages that fail in doing their job, all because the visitors can’t see where you put that call-to-action. Maybe they can’t even identify it as a call-to-action. If there exist critical problems that need to be dealt with immediately, that’s certainly one of them; but first things first, you’d need a data visualization tool that will create a heat map and detect this problem for you.

“17 Killer Link Building Ideas” in the second paragraph got a lot of clicks despite not being a link.

Heat maps with colored smudges (the brighter the smudge, the more clicks in the colored area) aren’t the only way Crazy Egg can display information; it can also show clicks as confetti-like dots on the screen or just show the number of clicks received by each element, clickable or not.

In a similar vein, visitors hope clicking on the image in the top right corner will do something fun.

I’d like to demonstrate how exactly Crazy Egg can be useful by using our own website as an example. We’ve tried it and we know it works.

Case 1: How We Helped Our Users Know Us Better

February 2015, when the index and Online SEO Tools pages on our site looked somewhat different from now. We got word from our support angels that many users were having difficulties finding our contact information. When we scanned those two pages with Crazy Egg, the users’ concerns were confirmed: the Company & Contact Info link that was in the bottom footer on those pages had barely any clicks. (It’s in the second column in the screenshot below.)

So we took action.

• We put a Contact Us link in the Get in Touch column (now called Follow Us);
• We changed the Support and FAQ link to Get Support (later changed to FAQ);
• Company & Contact Info was renamed to About Company (unchanged to this day);
• And we tweaked the colors a little because grey text on a grey background was hard to read on some displays.

Results were positive and almost immediate. Renamed links were much simpler to understand and easier to find, especially on a lighter background. Later we made a new column called Help & Support and put everything that was relevant there. No new complaints have been fielded regarding the new order of things so far.

Case 2: How We Learned to Say the Right Thing

June 2015. Our Pricing and Support pages used to have two near identical Need help? blocks, with only one minor difference. Pricing had a button with the text WebCEO Support, while the same button on Support was called Ask a Question. Crazy Egg’s heat map data showed that the latter received considerably more clicks. It was deemed a good example, so the WebCEO Support button was renamed after its more popular brother and became more popular, too.

These days, the Need help? block on the Support page looks completely different.

Case 3: When Beauty Saves the World and Prompts More Clicks

June 2016, one year later. In an earlier case, WebCEO’s angels got a mere cameo. This time, they were in the middle of the spotlight.

Customers love our angels so much, they want to talk to them at any opportunity. Imagine their disappointment when clicking on their photos on our Support page did absolutely nothing. (I know I’d be hurt.) Implementing the function of choosing an operator to chat with would be too much, so we went for something simpler instead. Now clicking on an angel’s face displays some information about her hobbies and interests. I had no idea Julie wrote fantasy fiction in her free time!

Julie is the one on the far left.

Those were some of the most interesting examples. We’ve also used Crazy Egg for things like checking if a newly implemented feature was worth having, or which element from a group of similar ones on the same page has been getting more clicks. In the meantime, we keep looking at splotches on the heat maps and hope that we’ve finally got our site and service a perfect design… at least until the next report arrives.

The post How Crazy Egg Helped Improve the User Experience on Our Site appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

In my childhood, there was a popular poetry book with the subtitle “for naughty children only!” From this book you could learn that it is OK to jump out the window with your mom’s umbrella, or that you can draw a portrait of your granny on a wall as a birthday present for her. “There are naughty children who always do exactly the opposite of what they are told to do. For these children the book has been written.”

I found this book when I visited my parents on Christmas vacation and immediately had an idea for a blog post! Let’s imagine what fake SEO advice your competitors would be happy to give you.

1. Test your site on your own monitor only. If your site looks good on your own computer, it will look good on all devices.

No, it won’t. Today desktop screen resolutions vary widely, and that’s without mentioning mobile devices! You should ensure your site visitors have the best experience using your site on their devices. To do this, go to your Google Analytics → Audience → Browser & OS. Here select “Screen resolution” as a primary dimension and “Browser size” as a secondary one.

This report will show what screen resolutions your visitors have. Now you can see your site through their eyes. If you use the Chrome browser, as I do, you can use the Resolution test plugin or any other tool that lets you imitate different screen sizes.

2. Make the website load slowly to make your visitors spend more time on it.

Slow pages annoy both search engines and visitors. The content of your site is the power that can involve users and keep them on your site. How will you know if your site pages are fast enough? Use WebCEO’s Website Audit Tool and check the Speed Optimization report.

The best advice is: “Check the page speed score for all your important pages and fix the issues WebCEO has found.”

3. Give your visitors more choices.

Well, this one is tricky. Having choices is considered a good thing. However, the more choices a website offers, the harder it is for a visitor to choose something.

Hick’s Law says that increasing the number of choices will increase decision time logarithmically. A user overwhelmed with choices often decides to leave. The “jam experiment” provided by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper proves this. If you are not familiar with the experiment I will retell you in brief: it was found that consumers were 10 times more likely to purchase jam on display when the number of jams available was reduced from 24 to 6. More choice, fewer sales.

How to use this knowledge on your site:

• If you want your readers to share your content, give them a limited number of ways to do so. Just pick the most important social sharing icons and not clutter your site with the rest.
• On a landing page, don’t try to make the entire sale; instead, convince visitors to take one action. Remember, that a single offer asks customers to make one decision.
• Don’t try to display all your options on a home page. Leave only the most important ones.

4. Optimize different pages for the same keywords.

Keyword cannibalism is still a thing. The problem of having multiple pages targeting the same keywords is as awful as it sounds. Why is it a problem?

When each page of a website is focusing on the same set of keywords, search engines need to choose which page is more relevant for optimized query and decide what page to show in SERPs. This means that pages that should convert visitors into clients will compete with the whole internet and even other pages of your site!

To avoid keyword cannibalization, decide which pages on your site you should optimize for which keywords. WebCEO’s Keyword Research can help you to find the most effective keywords that will enhance your website’s visibility, attract a targeted audience, and improve your search engine rankings.

5. Use more & more pop-ups to grab visitor attention.

In 2004 pop-up windows were called the most hated advertising technique – 95% of users asked by John Boyd from Yahoo! and Christian Rohrer from eBay rated this technique the most negatively. Over the past few years, pop-ups have re-emerged as a popular marketing tactic for growing email lists, promoting content and lead generation.

Do you need those passive-aggressive pop-ups to get more subscribers? Some AWeber research shows that a pop-up subscription form drove 1,375% more subscriptions.

Surely we do not call to sacrifice site performance for user experience. We call you to create only user-friendly pop-ups that convert users!

• Think about how people interact with your site and show pop-ups only when they are appropriate. For example, you can suggest that visitors subscribe to new blog posts when someone scrolls down the page as she reads the content.
• Offer something valuable. You can offer a free ebook or a coupon code for a person who spent a specific amount of time on your pages.
• Don’t ruin the mobile experience. Pop-ups are so distracting on mobile devices that Google even promised to penalize sites for using them.

Share your best “fake SEO advice” in comments!

The post 5 Instances of Fake SEO Advice Your Competitors Will Be Happy to Give You appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complicated strategy with many moving parts, made even more complicated by the fact that Google doesn’t publish the true nature or exact mechanisms of its ranking algorithm. Instead, we rely on a number of “best practices” and fundamentals we’ve learned to be successful through trial and error and collaboration over the years. Some of these fundamentals are more obvious than others, and some marketers jump straight into the game with ongoing strategies like content marketing and offsite optimization without making sure all these foundational best practices are in place.

The Most Missed SEO Fundamentals

If you want to be successful in SEO, you must first build a foundation of onsite optimization and general best practices. These are some of the most commonly neglected SEO fundamentals out there, so make sure you aren’t neglecting them:

1. A keyword strategy. For starters, you will need a good keyword strategy, as it’s going to dictate the course of your campaign. Lately, we’ve seen a decline in keyword prioritization, which is admittedly appropriate; thanks to Google’s Hummingbird update, semantic search has taken precedence over older, keyword-based optimization tactics. However, keywords are still relevant, and you still need a strategic basis to guide your campaign. If nothing else, keywords should help you define your niche and select the topics for your ongoing content campaign, as well as helping you measure your ultimate results.
2. An intuitive site navigation (and URL structure). You’ll also need to structure your site in a way that’s SEO friendly. For most sites, that means listing all your pages in categories and subcategories, giving both search engines and users more tools to understand how your site is laid out. These should be both intuitive and descriptive, so there’s no question where each page belongs. Correspondingly, you will need a breadcrumbs-influenced URL structure that concisely informs users where they are on your site (and how to get back should they need to).
3. HTML and XML sitemaps. Extending from your site navigation and URL structure, you’ll need to include both an HTML and XML sitemap for your site (and keep them updated regularly). Your HTML sitemap will reside on your site directly, while your XML sitemap should be uploaded to Google through Webmaster Tools. This will help Google index your site faster, more efficiently, and more accurately as well.
4. Unique content for every page of your site. At this point in the history of SEO, this should go without saying, but we’re consistently surprised at the number of brands still neglecting onsite content. If a topic deserves a page on your site, it deserves at least 300 words of intelligently written, concise content that describes that topic. All of it should be unique, so don’t cheap out by copying content from other pages of your site or writing fluff.
5. Unique titles and descriptions for each page of your site. Furthermore, every page of your site should have a concise, uniquely descriptive title tag and a meta description that fleshes out that page’s function. You can check for inconsistencies or redundancies in Google Search Console, but this should be one of your first steps in optimizing your onsite pages. Also keep in mind that these entries are what users will see when they encounter your business in SERPs, so you’ll also want to optimize them for click-through rates.
6. Optimizing your images. Optimizing images for SEO isn’t complicated, but it’s still often neglected due to its perceived difficulty and lack of significance. It doesn’t take much; make sure your images are properly formatted and sized appropriately, then title them in a way that describes their content and provide alt tags that further describe what’s happening in the scene. This won’t necessarily increase your domain authority, but it’s a simple step that can get your site featured in more image searches.
7. Building backlinks. Though not related to onsite optimization (like most of these fundamentals), we want to mention link building because it’s commonly neglected due to the perceived risk involved. Make no mistake; you need backlinks if you’re going to rank in search engines, and building them manually (carefully following best practices) is the best way to get them. To effectively manage and monitor your backlink profile, consider using WebCEO’s Backlink Checker. This tool helps you identify and analyze the quality of backlinks pointing to your website, ensuring they align with best practices and contribute positively to your SEO strategy.

These seven fundamentals will prime your campaign for long-term results; without them, you may not be able to get off the ground even if you commit to best practices like ongoing content and social media marketing. You’ll note that a number of these are qualitative in nature; your keyword strategy will differ from all your other competitors’, and your onsite content will demand differentiation as well. While there’s no one right way to go about implementing these fundamentals, they do demand your attention and thorough development, so prioritize them.

The post The 7 Most Overlooked Fundamentals in SEO appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

There are 3 major types of landing pages and each serves its own goals.

Let’s imagine you own a huge supermarket. First you can segment this into departments, i.e. canned goods, boxed goods, produce, home supply department etc. This is a must because, when people visit a supermarket, they go straightway to a specific department because they have specific shopping needs.  This is how your website should be built. Your home page is a showcase of your site and the landing pages that describe your product features and solutions are specific departments which attract targeted traffic that is generated from specific search queries. If a visitor’s search intent has a transactional character (she wants to buy a specific item over the Internet), you wouldn’t want to send a visitor to your cluttered home page but, instead, you would send her to a product description page with pricing and a clear call-to-action in order to get more conversions.

The key objective of landing pages optimization is to narrow down and capture targeted visitor traffic and turn this into prequalified leads and ready-to-pay customers. But messages and the ways to attract traffic with the help of landing pages are different.

For example, if you have a website dedicated to online marketing services, you can build a specific internal website page that will cover one of the solutions you provide, be it SEO, or email marketing, or social media marketing. These internal website landing pages, if optimized properly, will show up in organic search results.

If you launch a PPC campaign via Google Adwords, Social Media ads, or via email marketing campaign and your goal is to provide a sales pitch, you can create a PPC landing page with sales-dedicated copy with a clear offer and above-the-fold call to actions.

And finally, if you launch a free content giveaway campaign or a viral campaign via a blog post or social media and your goal is lead generation, your landing page should have rich copy with unique and helpful content and with link incentives for users to share their contact details or get in touch via an inquiry form. This type of landing page is called a lead capture page.

Anyway, all roads lead to Rome. No matter what the goal, how much money you spend and what way you choose to bring targeted traffic to your site, your landing page should convey a high value, strong incentive with solid benefits.

Bite on this: According to Omniture: [Tweet “Marketing campaigns that use landing pages as target pages improve conversion rates by 25%.”]

To give your landing pages high conversions, follow these step-by-step recommendations.

1. Do keyword research to match a searcher’s intent with the topics of your landing pages.

Whatever type of landing page you choose, the first thing you should do is find user matched and SEO-friendly keywords. Users have short attention spans; it takes about 2 sec for them to click your result or not in the SERPs. So you should definitely use the keywords that closely match a user’s search intent with the key concept of your landing page.

An effective action plan for your landing page keyword research includes brainstorming and the refinement of a complex list of keyword phrases and long-tail keywords based on:

• Brand terms
• Generic terms
• Closely-related terms (synonyms)
• Competitive terms

There are a lot of useful keyword research tools on the web, like the Google AdWords Keyword Planner (great for PPC keyword search and analysis), the Bing Keyword Research Tool, KeywordTool.io, the WordTracker Keyword Research tools etc. Most of them provide in-depth keyword suggestions and estimates of their search volume.  Most keyword research tools fail to easily integrate your work on your keyword lists with what necessarily must follow: landing page optimization and keyword rank tracking.

Unlike these great but insufficient tools, the Web CEO Keyword Research Tool embraces four stages of keyword research:

Shape keyword suggestions

Sign up to Web CEO, add your website to our Add New Project wizard and start with finding the most relevant and profitable keyword suggestions in the Keyword Research tool → Get keyword Suggestion tab

With the help of special filters you can narrow down your suggestions in order to pick only those with 100+> global searches and low bid competition. Add your selected keywords to the Keyword Basket

Add terms used by your competition

Spy on your competitors targeted terms by adding a competitor’s domain or even specific landing page URL. Then add newly selected keywords to the basket.

Back this up with Google data for your website search queries

Use the search keywords that searchers have already used to reach your site. You can see how many impressions, clicks, CTR and the average position they had on Google over the past month (note that the WebCEO Rank Tracker tool itself provides fresh ranking data). Add them to the basket as well.

Refine your keyword list and assign tags

Once, you have selected your keywords, go to the Keyword Basket in order to get them in taxonomic order. With the help of the tag manager in the Web CEO keyword research tool, in every stage of keyword research you can assign tags to keyword family groups by, for instance, landing page goal and intent, language, or relevance and significance. It will be much easier to optimize you landing page content, once you have shaped your keywords spreadsheet into topical clusters via tags.

2. Put in order your keyword-to-page relationships

When you’ve finished grabbing and tagging the most profitable terms and long-tail keyword tag clusters, you can start to align them with your landing pages to make them SEO-friendly. You should focus on using 2-3 primary keywords for each page. No matter what the length of your landing page copy is, the goal is to add your targeted keywords wisely and match them with the topic of your page. Focus keyword mapping on sensitive SEO areas in order to establish your landing page theme and match your message to a user’s search intent. Sensitive areas are:

• URL: fill your landing page URL address with your 2-3 targeted keywords for that page in order to communicate the landing page’s semantic core to search engines.
• Title: put the targeted keywords (phrases) at the beginning in order to communicate the message of your landing page content (its offer). The Title tag should not exceed 55 characters;
• Headings: put keywords in H-tags to improve their search value, be sure to not have more than one H1 tag per page;
• Image name and its ALT attribute: use a targeted keyword in both the image file name and ALT tag to get additional ranking power, especially in image search, and make visual content SE-readable;
• Meta description: transmit your landing page message and value to search engines and searchers with a keyword-rich description tag (it should not exceed 160 characters).

3. Check your landing page SEO for weak spots and fix them

 Ok, your obedient keywords are now in their places. Before it’s too late and you lose your targeted traffic, make sure that you have properly conducted keyword mapping within your landing pages.

The easiest way to do this is to run your Landing Page SEO Analysis with WebCEO at hand:

Run a Landing Page Overview that will help you take a quick view of all your landing pages’ SEO performance (i.e.: critical SEO issues, page speed score, Google mobile friendliness, broken links, backlinks and social citations)

The more specific Landing Page SEO report will provide you with a detailed look at your keyword placement within any given page as well as other SEO issue details for that page. If you see a low keyword optimization score, you can either reconsider what keywords the page should be optimized for or go into your HTML and properly add your chosen keywords into the proper meta tags, etc. All the SEO issues you will find will come with detailed advice on how to get them fixed.

4. Match your landing page copy with design elements and layout

 A well-designed landing page with a logical structure flow is crucial. It takes only several seconds for a visitor to fall in love or not with your site (plus the time to load a page).  When you come to the design of a landing page, your key objective is to make it simple, short, uncluttered and persuasive. When you give too many visual focuses, you will cause them to get distracted and uncertain on their way through the conversion funnel. So, you need to give them one task and provide them with logical grounds for their decision making. Here are 5 must-have design elements that will help you tell your story and grab a user’s attention in order to make him or her complete your desired action.

• Your company logo at the top that builds strong brand awareness.
• A proposition-focused headline that tells what your product focuses on.
• A sub-headline that explains what your product can do for users.
• A topic-related image that transmits and supports the message of your proposition.
• Benefit bullet points for your proposition.
• Relevant and prominent call-to-action buttons that clearly describe what will happen upon clicking.
• Lead capture form use where appropriate
• Social-proof accolades (testimonials, case-studies, embedded social media posts and social media buttons that open to your popular social pages in separate browser tabs)

While you put the main focus on the simplicity of your landing page visual and content elements layout, you should avoid any negative distracting clutter such as:

– Menu navigation with too many sidetracking links

– Too many call-to-actions per offer

– Too much text

– Freakish hard-to-read fonts

– Lack of white space

Keep in mind that the biggest enemy of your landing page conversion tally is the browser back button. You should put all your effort into making users click on your call-to-action buttons instead of the dreaded browser back button.

If you are in a startup and have no designers to help you build and customize landing pages, Instapage would be of great help to you. It allows you to create mobile responsive landing pages from scratch or based on existing templates, publish on your domain, integrate with a CRM, conduct email marketing and work with other third-party tools, as well as monitor your performance and conversion analytics and run A/B split tests.

5. Streamline your landing pages with the Google mobile-friendly guidelines

In 2015, mobile searches officially surpassed desktop searches. Unless you into business suicide, you will want mobile-friendly versions of your landing pages with a slightly different message in some cases. The fact is that mobile users are more goal-driven, while desktop users are more benefit-driven in their intention. It’s in your power to make your landing pages kindly welcome mobile users with a positive user experience. Meet the following requirements for a better mobile-optimized landing page in order to increase your mobile landing page conversions:

Content

• 3-4 word succinct headlines
• Short actionable call-to-action buttons

Design

• Orderly single-column page layout
• Negative (white) space between clickable elements
• Legible fonts (16 pixels)
• Color contrast between text and background

Usability

• Light-weight page size (less than 20KB)
• Top-oriented and clickable call buttons
• Content accessibility (no flash, frames and plugins)
• Thumb-friendly touch targets (eliminate zooming)

Read more about Google’s requirements for mobile-friendly content in this mobile issues checklist

Tip: Plan your landing pages with mobile search in mind, so you don’t have to scale down your content and layout after the fact.

6. Verify which landing page layout works best with A/B testing

No one likes landing page bounces and exits. You will experience them until you find out why you fail to convert visitors who come to each landing page. A/B testing is a great trial-and-error method for landing page conversion rate optimization.

Set up your original landing page as a control and start running experiments against it. There are five elements of a landing page you can control and test to improve your landing page performance.

• Headline + subheadline
• Copy length
• Image
• The call-to-action
• Form fields
• Explicit directional cues (arrows, pathways etc.)

Read more about some of the aspects of A/B testing for landing page optimization in this post written by our Product Manager and regular WebCEO blog contributor, Helen Vozna. 

Secret hack from WebCEO: With the help of the WebCEO Rank Tracker you can spy on your competitors’ organic and PPC landing pages. Go to Competitor Rankings by Keyword and click on a keyword that is related to your landing page topic. You will see the SERP cached results with the links of your competitor landing pages. Analyze competitor landing pages and find hidden opportunities for your headline copy or call-to-action A/B experiments.

The post 6 Actionable Steps to Build a Top-Selling Landing Page appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Local SEO clients easily become loyal, if you find the way to impress them. We know 3 EFFICIENT WAYS to their hearts!

 1. Optimize Landing Pages for Local Search

Landing page optimization for local search has some special aspects we covered in the Local SEO Guide previously. To summarize I’ll name the most important:

• Make sure your landing pages are unique and informative.
• Add local signals like your address, telephone, map, etc.
• Optimize your Google My Business listing.
• Get more positive reviews on your Google My Business listings.
• Get some great citations. Great means that the quality matters much more than quantity.
• Use social media to interact with your customers.

Tip: Use the Local Search Optimization tips from the Web CEO SEO Roadmap.

2. See SERPs as Real Local Visitors Do

With the Web CEO Rank Tracker you can get exactly the same results as real local searchers do. Go to the ‘Search Engines’ tab of the Rank Tracker settings. When adding a search engine, select a country you want to target – you can also add a target language – and set the location to be sure you get the exact results.

Then go to the ‘Google blended results’ tab and enable vertical search results you want to monitor. The Google Places are a must for local search optimization.

One more way to have your finger on the local search pulse is to add the local social profile. To see how your social profiles are ranked, add them on the ‘Social profile URLs’ tab of the Rank Tracking settings.

3. Reports in Multiple Languages

Recently we’ve added the ability to use WebCEO on your native language and to provide your clients with the SEO reports they would understand. Add languages you want to use through the My account –> Languages menu. Then go to the Client Reporting Settings, choose a specific task you want to change the reporting language for, go to the Message settings and select a PDF report language.

Besides, when exporting any Web CEO report you can briefly change the language of your interface (the language icon is also on the top right hand corner of the main interface) and then export or mail a PDF in that language, before switching back to your regular interface language.

P.S.: Remember that most local searches are done via mobile devices – 50% of all mobile searches are conducted in the hope of finding local results. So make sure your client’s local site is ready before 4/21, which is when the major Google Mobile Update is set for.

The post 3 Ways to Impress Your Local SEO Clients appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

What is the biggest challenge for today’s website owners and digital marketers? It is to keep your target visitors as long as possible on your site and direct them softly to the end point of the conversion funnel that is a call-to-action. To evaluate the rate of visitor engagement you can use the Google Analytics Behavior insights such as the Bounce Rate and Average Time on Page. The higher the bounce rate and the lower the average time on page, the lower the conversion rate is. What is the best SEO technique you can use to improve the score for these SEO variables and make people dive deeper into your website? –Highlighted hyperlinks in the body of pages can bring a reader to other important pages where he can find additional relevant info, then sign up for your service, buy your product, subscribe for a newsletter or leave his contact details. In SEO we call all this internal links map or structure.

What are the types of internal links to use for effective internal links optimization?

Links are the doors that search engine crawlers and users pass to find each of your pages. It fully depends on you to open or close your internal link doors for search engines and your potential clients. A good internal links structure includes a complex system of interlinking on a site that that includes different types of internal links:

• Navigational links serve to put a website’s navigation into a structured order. These can include menu links, sidebar links or breadcrumb links.
• Footer links are often sitewide links that serve as a sitemap and help new users find quick access to the most valuable pages on a site.
• Contextual or editorial links are links located in the body of a page and surrounded by relevant copy.

Editorial links are the most valuable types of internal links from an SEO and user experience perspective. While navigational links are just the static anchors on a site, editorial links are dynamic beacons which help users and search engines drift your website easily from page to page. If properly optimized, internal links are the best SEO technique to establish a website’s theme for better indexing and crawling by search engines and for increasing your landing pages’ ranking power and authority. The most important part in the structure of the internal link is a visible and clickable area of the link which is most often anchor text, the descriptive keyword or phrase that is pasted in the HTML link after the targeted page URL and before the closing link tag.

Here is an example of a perfect, SEO-friendly internal link with properly optimized anchor text:

<a href=”https://www.webceo.com/blog/find-and-neutralize-toxic-links-with-the-web-ceo-backlink-quality-checker/> Web CEO Backlink Quality Check</a>

Here, the anchor text with relevant explanatory long-tail keyword in bold clearly points to the target page.

Here is another example:

<a href=”https://online.webceo.com/?aw=ranker/detailsbyse/>monitor keyword rankings</a>

Here, we use an internal link as the call-to-action that not only describes the target page (which is the page of the tool for tracking site rankings), but induces people to sign up for our service by clicking on the registration page. Being a part of the post, it serves as an organic call-to-action button.

What are the benefits from internal links optimization?

There are several positive effects you can achieve via internal links optimization.

• Make the website easy-to-navigate for new visitors.
• Make the website theme clear in the eyes of the search engines.
• Increase the number of page views.
• Reduce the bounce rate.
• Benefit from visitor responses to organic call-to-actions.
• Spread the link juice throughout your website.
• Internal Links are much more easily controlled and optimized than external backlinks.

What are the best SEO tips to strengthen your internal links structure and spread SE ranking juice all over your website?

1. Make sure your internal links are not broken or blocked by the Robots.txt file. To check the accessibility of your internal links, use the Landing Page SEO report of the WebCEO SEO Analysis tool for free.
2. Avoid any Java, Flash, IFrames and other plug-ins when building your internal link map.
3. Associate (or tie) the most authoritative landing pages with less authoritative ones. Ranking for hundreds of targeted terms within one single page (be it the home page or another top landing page) is a mission: impossible. You are better off mapping targeted keywords on other relevant internal landing pages.
4. Diverse the anchor texts of your internal links. With Post-Hummingbird SEO, it is essential to make your content user-friendly and theme-focused. For the most effective optimization of anchor texts of your internal links, use the Internal Links Optimization tool for free (no limitations in the Free Plan).
5. Improve the page speed score for the landing pages where your most valuable internal links are displayed. If your site is loading longer than 3-6 sec, this means it may cause a bad user experience. In this case, there is no need to optimize your internal links at all, because people are likely to leave it immediately (or stop trying to load it), especially those who use mobile devices. The page speed score is one of Google’s SEO ranking factors, so proper page speed optimization is a must for the better performance of your landing pages.
6. Orchestrate a great mobile user experience on your landing pages. Make your internal links thumb-friendly and easy-to-click without zooming. Starting on April 21, mobile friendliness will be officially added to Google’s ranking algorithm and, if your website is poorly optimized for mobile, don’t expect to keep high rankings. Check your landing pages now for any mobile optimization issues with the Mobile Optimization report from WebCEO. Be prepared for spring.

The post 6 SEO Tips to Improve Your Internal Links Structure and Tie Visitors to Nearly Every Page of Your Site appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Marketers tend to be obsessed with high rankings but the final goal of good content marketing is traffic.  Targeted traffic shows up at your door when you’ve optimized your site for the right SEO keywords. What helps you to find the right keywords? Detailed keyword research is crucial. Then, instead of being obsessed with high rankings for your targeted keywords, think of the conversion rate for each of them and optimize for that. It is conversion that helps you to pay the bills.

When you do research for high converting keywords you should focus on a “cluster,” not on a “core”. Having a very limited targeted keywords cloud can cause you to sink in competition bog and miss your chance to attract targeted and high converting traffic. Richard Jacobs (an Attorney Marketing Specialist at Speakeasy Marketing Inc.) likened a keyword to a dandelion in his Dandelion Keyword Theory:

This concerns both SEO and PPC efforts. When you are bidding on a particular phrase or long-tail term…you should not bid on that particular keyword but on patterns surrounding it. Think of your targeted  SEO keywords as a circle tangent to a larger area outside of your circle; the bigger your circle of keywords, the larger will be the number of search queries related to your selected SEO keywords realm.

As soon as you realize that keywords are not only about rankings, start to build a semantic core from your main keyword’s fluffy halo. With special thanks to the Zamurai Blogger, here are some types of keywords that can convert extremely well if optimized and implemented properly:

1.  User Intent keywords. These are mainly long tail question phrases and conversational terms real searchers use. Examples would be “Who’s the best lawyer in Dodge City” or “I want to buy a wedding dress in downtown Seattle”. Most of us ask concrete questions and type in detailed queries to reduce the time and efforts on searching of what we need. Your task is to reduce your competitor chances to appear higher than you in search results.
2.  Local Terms. These are keywords and phrases that include a nearby location. If your business has a physical location than this type of keyword is a must if you want to drive high converting searchers to your site.
3.  User Decision Making Analysis Keywords. Many people will not only type in “What is the best product in XYZ Category” or “What is the best pizza place in Manhattan” but they will search for “Review Products XYZ Category” or “Comparison of Manhattan Pizza Places.” You can post a review or comparison of your product with another product to handle such queries. Searchers may be looking for case studies with which to make their decisions such as “Customer experiences XYZ Category,” so you will want to write about some of your satisfied customers as case studies. Other customers are specifically looking for special offers and discounts, so you will want to have active landing pages with some special offers going most of the time and visible on search engines. Then build your anchor texts around all these ”decision making” keywords and see how your conversion rate starts to grow.
4. List Keywords. People love structured lists. Write posts and optimize landing pages for keyword phrases like “Top 10 of…”, “6 reasons why you should…”, “A list of…” etc.
5. Thought Leader Keywords. Some product categories have been made famous by or are associated with a celebrity or thought leader and their actual or potential endorsement of a product would be important for a buyer to make a decision. You may want to optimize some pages for keywords like “What is Sean Connery’s favorite hotel in Scotland” or “What Martini Brand would James Bond prefer” even if your product wasn’t specifically recommended by them. As long as your content doesn’t lie and is very interesting to readers, it can provide you with a lot of targeted traffic. For instance, if you owned a hotel in Scotland, you could provide a list of a few hotels Sean Connery would probably like and playfully state that he is welcome anytime at your hotel. Optimally, you will want to write about how you got the real attention of someone whose opinion would be valued for your product category.

Here are several places where you can do research for high conversion keywords:

• Google Analytics →Acquisition → Search Engine Optimization → Queries report. These are the real intent-based keywords that have brought folks directly to your site. If you really want to increase your conversion rate this is the first place you should look for high converting terms.
• Keyword cluster provided in the WebCEO Keyword Research tool suggestions. The key features of this tool allow you to select the most effective keywords thanks to our keyword parameter range filters of global searches, local searches, bid competition and KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index).

• Google search related suggestions. This is the easiest way to look for searches typed in by other users. Type in all possible questions and conversational phrases that are relevant to your site. As soon as you click on a search button, Google will provide the most relevant and popular combinations closely related to your search query at the bottom of the first page. Another option is the Google Autocomplete predictions that are enabled when you type in some query and see all possible suggestions dropped down from the search box.
• If your site is complex and  you don’t have an on-site search option installed on your website yet, you’d better implement this because Google Analytics will retain this data and you can then get more alternative keyword clusters that you can focus on for better SEO and PPC campaigns. An internal search data analysis allows you to see the search terms that greatly differ from the external search queries provided in Google Analytics. The point is that user search intent on Google is more generic while onsite user search intent is more specific.

Don’t forget to give extra attention to your high conversion keywords and thematically optimized landing pages.. Give your content, that is rich in targeted converting keywords, a boost via social channel sharing and link building.

Tip: Your content theme and keyword clusters should be supported by diverse internal link texts. WebCEO Internal Links Optimization Guide will help you to analyze your link texts and fine-tune a strong semantic field for your landing pages so you can get higher rankings for your targeted search queries.

The post 5 Must-Have Keywords to Increase Organic Conversions appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

What is a structured snippet?

Google web search has evolved in the last several years. With personalized and conversational search powered by Knowledge Graph Optimization, Google tries to pick the most relevant data from your site in order to return it to searchers under search query links.  It’s likely that newly designed structured snippets are the result of the long-term rollout of the Google Hummingbird enhanced algorithm.

The idea of extracting relevant information from your site comes from Google’s intention to deliver well structured results from unstructured content.

Structured snippets are snippets supported by a structured data rich description of a page that appears in the Google SERPs. Though Google is getting smarter, it uses bots to read and parse the important meta data contained in your content. Structured data is a general name that stands for all HTML markups determined by a predefined set of rules. To implement structured data on your site, you need to mark up aspects of your content (e.g. personal info, review details, product specs etc) with specific tags in your HTML code. There are several ways to add structured data on your site:

• Microdata (recommended)
• Microformats
• RDFa

It’s preferably using microdata, but you can go with any of the ways. Use the Google Structured Data Markup Helper to understand what properties of the content on your pages should be added to your structured data markup.

Let’s analyze the quality of well-implemented structured data on one of the structured snippets of the recipe of my favorite dessert, Tiramisu.

In the recipe snippet example we have some of the property tags:

1. Ratings
2. Photo
3. Name
4. Total time
5. Prep time (sorting ingredients, warming oven)

A perfect structured snippet of a recipe should include:

• Photo
• Review (ratings)
• Name of food/type of food
• Prep time and/or or total time
• Ingredients
• Calories

It would be great if the owner of Foodnetwork.com include in its structured data calories, ingredients and other property tags. I would definitely click on the query that listed such essential data.

How can my website get rewarded for using Structured Snippets?

The use of structured data will have a strong positive effect on your site. The most evident results will be an uptick in the click through rate that directly affects the boost of traffic to your site. After you have patterned your structured data markup, keep an eye on your global and local rank performance. By the way, WebCEO Online has just added to its Keyword Rank Checker the opportunity to monitor mobile rankings! Additionally, conducting a comprehensive Website Audit can ensure that your structured data is correctly implemented and functioning optimally, which is essential for achieving the best possible search rankings.

What information from my site should appear in structured snippets?

Google picks your most important HTML tags which include different content types like product specs, addresses, phone numbers, prices, recipes, reviews, personal info and other properties of your content. That being said, if your website is related to eCommerce, local services like restaurants and hotels or to sites with music and video content, you should pattern all the specific  properties of your content into table-based data markup. As for the format of pattern, Google now recommends that you use the Schema.org markup specification and Structured Data Testing Tool in order to avoid pitfalls.

The post Structured Snippets: How to Decorate SERPS With Structured Data Patterns From Your Website appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

A snippet is what we first see in search results and social media streams, it’s what makes us click or re-share. That is why, as a search engine marketer, you should pay attention to what searchers actually see in the search engine result pages.

First of all you should understand what a snippet consists of.

Google Snippet

Title is retrieved from the <title> of the page. It is better to have it 70 characters or less, however now it is often said that search engines limit the length of the Titles by the pixels, not by keywords.

Description – Google uses <meta name=”description” content=”…” /> of a page as a description in a snippet. We recommend shortening your description to 150 characters, because the description will be truncated anyway after 160 characters.

Url of the page is usually truncated to show the search term.

If the found content is verified with Google+, the searchers will also see name, Google+ circles and a photo of the author. Also Google tries to generate the date of the post.

Sitelinks – Google analyzes the link structure of the site and shows a cascade of sitelinks for results when they’ll be useful to the user. At the moment, sitelinks are automated, but you can demote any of them if they are incorrect.

To demote a sitelink URL:

1. Go to the Google Webmaster Tools.
2. Under ‘Search Appearance’, click ‘Sitelinks’.
3. In the ‘For this search result’ box, complete the URL for which you don’t want a specific sitelink URL to appear.
4. Complete the URL of the sitelink you want to demote, in the ‘Demote this sitelink URL’.

Rich Snippet

Rich Snippets are search results with enhancements like pictures, reviews, prices, events, show times, phone numbers, addresses and even recipes. These snippets (aka Structured Data or Metadata) are just specialized code that you add to your site. Google then displays these extras for your search results. They result in a much higher click thru rate and visitors love them.

Schema.org is the home of all the available snippet formats that the search engines have agreed, as a group, to support going forward.

Use the Google Structured Data Markup Helper to generate HTML code with microdata markup included; and Google’s Rich Snippet testing tool to preview your rich snippet. However, Google doesn’t guarantee your search snippet will look that way.

To ensure your website’s content is optimized effectively for these snippets, employing a tool like WebCEO’s SEO Content Assistant can be incredibly beneficial. It helps you create and refine your meta descriptions, titles, and other content to maximize their impact in search engine results, aligning with the best practices for creating compelling snippets.

Google+ Snippet

Google used a wide variety of markup when generating the Google Plus snippet including Schema.org, Facebook’s Open Graph protocol and regular Meta description and title. However, recently the descriptions were removed from Google+ snippets for a page that is being linked to in a post. While titles and images still accompany Google+ web page links, the description has been replaced by the URL of the page in most circumstances.

Testing proves that the snippets with the descriptions are created with interactive posts. Google+ Interactive Posts are ways of adding richer content to your Google+ posts.

Google+ Interactive posts allows you to prefill text in the post content for users who want to share your page, and to add “call to action” buttons that link to a specific URL. Besides it’s the only possible way to control the title, description and target URL of the post.

The post Search and Snippets: Love at First Sight appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.