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.

The following SEO Guide is not a Bible, but rather a list of recommendations and SEO trends listed in our actionable Semantic SEO Strategy guide. You can download this for FREE and use it alongside the 14+ free SEO tools which you will need for your website optimization and promotion in 2017.

What you’ll learn from this step-by-step handbook:

In the free 19 page handbook we’ve collected some up-to-date practical advice and how-to’s backed by 14+ free SEO tools hand-picked by our editors which will help you understand and implement the latest Google search optimization trends:

Chapter I. How contextual (semantic) search will change the way you manage your Content SEO Audits, and what tools will help you create user- and SEO-friendly website copy.

RankBrain forever changed the way we optimize website content for search engines. If, in 2015, RankBrain was used to interpret 15-20% of search queries, Google now uses RankBrain as a part of its core algorithm. Moreover, it applies its AI system for re-ranking search results. RankBrain doesn’t punish websites, but rather elevates or demotes them by relevance. How can you optimize for RankBrain? Ideally, you will need to learn how to read your targeted audience’s minds. But in real life, you will need to optimize your website for LSI keywords and contextual clues instead of standalone keywords.

In this chapter you’ll learn how to:

• Improve your website user experience by fixing on-page technical and content SEO issues.
• Contextualize Your Keyword Research and Optimization
• Improve visitors’ engagement and your content search visibility with a proper Internal Links structure
• Improve your website SERP clickability by optimizing your structured data with relevant and descriptive copy.

Chapter II. Step Up Your Mobile-First Search Index Game

Given the fact that Google, in 2017, is planning to launch a separate mobile search index which will eventually become the primary one, you should give mobile SEO your best shot…

Chapter III. Help Tools to Improve & Measure Your SEO Performance

When you plan something for tomorrow, you should play upon your previous experience, taking into account what worked best of all and what didn’t bring any benefits. You want to measure; we have the tools…

Sign up for a 14-days Free Trial and get exclusive access to a full guide and 14 professional SEO tools to help you apply our recommendations to your SEO strategy.

Words of Cheer

You never know what you can do til you try. You have a website and, if you work hard on it, you will be rewarded by Google. Our SEO strategy is a little leg-up for you to get this reward in 2017.

The post Semantic SEO Strategy: How to Do SEO in 2017 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.

Have you heard about the Pareto Rule? This principle was named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who analyzed the Italian land market and found that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the population. Eventually people started to apply the Pareto principle to other spheres of life, including business, technology, culture, education, management etc. The rule helps in balancing your business inputs-outputs in the most effective way: set business priorities, find the 20% of the most profitable segments of your business, what your business is good at and minify your spends on the aspects which take a lot of your time and resources and bring less profits.

Here are some common 80/20 rules which construct a paradigm of success in the Business and Digital Marketing world:

• 80% of your website traffic come from 20% of channel sources
• 80% of searchers visit 20% of website pages
• 80% of traffic is generated by 20% of your content
• 80% of profits come from 20% of your clients
• 80% ofsales come from 20% of your products
• 80% of social traffic come from 20% of social media sites

What about the Pareto rule when applying it to SEO and Internet Marketing? Considering the correlation 80/20, the key objective that most of the webmasters face is the optimization of SEO activities in order to reach the perfect correlation – 20% of inputs should bring 80% of outputs.

Let’s focus on what 20% of your inputsthat result in 80% of outputs. The aspects uncovered below are not absolute numbers of the formula of success, but a rough concept that can help you set priorities for a successful SEO Strategy.

20% of Your Niche Keywords Drive 80% of Traffic

Mighty content dandelions grow from little keyword seeds. You should focus on the best…a few dozen keywords in order to build a strong and authoritative blog pieces or landing pages. If you have not yet performed detailed Hummingbird-friendly keyword research or did it too long ago, give it a second wind.

 Keyword Research 

Start with keyword research of your niche in order to pick a list of keywords and phrases that is highly descriptive and relevant to your website theme.

Help tools: the WebCEO Keyword Research Tool → Get Suggestions

 Competitive Research

Dig into your competitor keyword analysis in order to narrow your list of targeted keywords and enrich your keyword basket with the most popular terms you want to compete for

Help tools: The WebCEO Keyword Research Tool → Spy on Competitors

 Search Queries Analyitcs 

Strengthen your keyword pattern with the search queries your website is mostly searchable for.

Help tools: Google Analytics → Search Engine Optimization → Queries + Google Search Console → Search Traffic → Search Analytics.

Update your content and research new keywords once you see a decrease in traffic or once you see your competition performing better than you. Don’t bother to post 7 days a week. Focus on producing the 20% of helpful, creative and timely content that will bring 80% of targeted traffic, quality leads and loyal customers.

20% of Landing Pages Drive the Attention of 80% of Users

When optimizing your website, you should bear in mind that only 20% of your website pages will drive 80% of overall traffic. These 20% of pages are your landing pages, – targeted pages which are critical to the buying process. Landing pages are a kind of accelerant for users to take actions and the efficiency of this depends on the transparency of the areas that users interact with in order to complete actions. That’s why you should focus on optimization of key aspects of your landing pages such as user experience and on-page SEO (keywords and internal links).

Landing Page SEO

If your website already receives some traffic, sit and analyze what pages of your website perform better than others. As soon as you find the pages visitors are mostly engaged with, dive deep into their on-page SEO

Help tools: Google Analytics → Search Engine Optimization → Landing Pages + Google Search Console → Search Traffic → Search Analytics.

Bonus tool: Web CEO Google Search Analytics provides you not only with analytics on your top pages found in search, but also allows you to mark the best performing pages as landing pages in order to further work with them in the Landing Page SEO tool of WebCEO.

User Experience Optimization

The interface and design of a landing page plays a critical role in the customer acquisition process. In order to find what 20% of page areas cause 80% of user actions, conduct the visualization and optimization of a page heatmap with the help of website heatmap tools.

Help tools: Crazy Egg.

Internal Links Analysis and Optimization

The Internal Links Structure of a website is critical both in the context of user experience, search visibility and SEO. An in-depth and user-friendly internal links map can significantly improve your landing page click-through rate, help search enginesindex and understand deeper pages of your site quickly, and thus increase your visibility and rankings.

Try to improve your website navigation in order to tie visitors to each of your landing pages and help them take actions on your site with the help of a robust internal links optimization.

Help tools: the WebCEO Internal Links Optimization tool

20% of Your Inbound Links Pass 80% of Link Juice

The quality of content is responsible for the quality of your backlinks. The better the content, the better the backlinks. But you should be aware of the fact that only 20% of your backlink profile passes the 80% of link juice that really affects your SEO. Of great importance is the type of backlink, its placement, anchor text and the source it’s put on.

In order to gain more benefits from the backlinks you build, you should first examine which of your external links bring the most value to your website. Then you can try to earn more of this type of backlinks. Analyze your competitors’ backlink profile for further link prospecting

Help tools: the WebCEO Backlink Quality Check tool + the WebCEO Competitor Backlink Spy tool + Ahrefs

Sign Up for the WebCEO all-in-one SEO platform in order to minify your SEO inputs.

If you have applied the 20/80 system to your SEO and marketing strategy and are ready to share your experience, feel free to share it using the comments section.

The post Pareto Rule in SEO: What 20% of Your Inputs Bring 80% of Outputs 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.

If you’ve been in business for more than 2 days, you already know that the key to success is to understand the needs of your target audience. If you own a crystal ball, great for you! You can always be informed about what your audience wants and how they feel when interacting with your site. If not, A\B testing (also called ‘split testing’) exists to bring knowledge into your guessing.

A/B testing is a great way to find out what type of proposal works best with your audience. To perform an A/B test, you set up two variants of a landing page and send an equal amount of traffic to each. Tested pages should be online simultaneously, so you can be sure there won’t be any variables that may change between today and tomorrow. Then you measure the level of conversions for each landing page, and determine the winner according to which one generates the most conversions.

Why should I test?

There are two ways to earn more money from your online business. The first is to drive more traffic, and the second is to convert more visitors into customers.

When you double your conversion rates, then you cut your cost per acquisition in half.

That is why you should test.

What should I test?

• The headline. Usually the main headline of the page contains your product core value proposition. The headline should correspond with the page Title and Description (if the page is meant for organic traffic) or your ad copy (if the visitors come from paid search or ads).
• The call to action (CTA). The call to action represents your page’s goal. The CTA is your final instruction to your visitors. Great CTAs encourage people to act right away and don’t give people much of an option to wait and think about it.
• Required fields in your web form. Try varying the amount of information you try to gather with any form on your landing page. You may find it best to minimize the number of fields that visitors are required to complete.
• The copy length. For some products and services, more product details may be important for decision making process. Test what copy length works best for you.
• Design. Button color, arrows, hero shots, contrast and other design decisions your designer is great at. Test what landing page design brings you more conversions.

How can I track results?

1. Use Google Analytics

With Google Analytics you can test what landing page variant performs best. You can conduct your experiments in Google Analytics from the reporting sidebar. Select Behavior, then Experiments. Select Create Experiment and follow Google’s instructions.

If you are testing changes to a page that already exists, use it as the Original (Control page). For entirely new content, pick the URL you will eventually want to use for the winner. Now you will only need to install the experiment code snippet just inside the <head> tag of your Original Page.

2. Use the ‘Landing Pages Overview’ report

If you are testing landing pages that bring you organic traffic, than you can get a quick overview with the help of the WebCEO Landing Pages Overview report. Check how well your landing pages load on mobile devices, compare their avg. position on Google and know how much traffic they get.

If you haven’t started yet, consider running your first A/B test as soon as possible. It will help you to optimize your conversions and outrank your competitors.

Glossary

Control Page

Your control page is your original page, your A page. The one that existed first that you are going to start running tests against.

Landing Page

Any web page that a visitor can arrive at and perform your desired action is a landing page. Usually you will have different landing pages for organic traffic and for visitors who come via advertising.

Winner Page

A page that gets a higher conversion rate during the A/B test is called a winner page. It proves a testing hypothesis and may be used for further experiments (improvements).

The post A/B Testing as easy as ABC: Improve Your Landing Page Conversions appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

A landing page is a page where traffic is sent specifically to perform a desired action. You can bring in traffic via PPC ads, banners, email newsletters and organic search traffic.

Nothing should distract visitors on their road to becoming your customers. Below are 5 common mistakes marketers make with their landing pages. We will tell you how to avoid them.

1. Unclear Call to Action

There is only one message and action on a good landing page. You should look at the page and have your eyes immediately drawn to the action area. The so called “paradox of choice” says that when given multiple options, the decision ends up being not to choose at all.

Make your desired action clear and distinctive. Do not place numerous offers or navigation on this page, nothing should draw the user into doing something else. If you need several choices (for example, different packages of your service), the goal is still single (visitors should choose a package). Ensure that all the choices are grouped together and can be considered the action area.

If you have content below the fold, repeat the call to action. Always make it easy and compelling for the visitor to take the desired action.

2. Poor Headlines

A headline is your chance to overcome attention filters your prospects may have because of modern information-overload. Focus on one thing you provide that your prospects feel is highly desirable. You should know the pain of your prospects and show them how you can relieve it.

Often, a good headline alone can boost the effectiveness of your landing page. Split-test different headlines and find which one brings you much higher conversions compared with others.

3. No Sense of Urgency

One of the best ways to make visitors take action is to create a sense of urgency. When your prospect feels that your proposition will expire soon or there is a limited number of copies, he/she will be more likely to act immediately.

Try adding a counter, showing how many copies left. Make your prospects feel that they should take action right now.

4. Weak Testimonials and No Guarantees

As social creatures, humans tend to place greater value on things that other people have already approved. Over 70% Americans say they look at product reviews before making a purchase. Nearly 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews.

Your testimonials should be real. Use testimonials that show how your product solves problems, common words like “it’s the best service ever” work less well.

Remember to include a photo of the person giving the testimonial – researchers have discovered that a photo will increase trust among all participants, even if said photo was nonsensical (didn’t relate to the written content).

5. Bad Design

The most popular screen size in the USA still is 1024 x 768, – says our web statistics. You should remember this, because it’s important to keep the most essential parts of your message – logo, headline, call to action, a supporting visual – in the center top of the screen, with supporting messaging lower down on the page.

• A clean simple design with plenty of white space attracts visitors’ attention to your call to action:
• Big font makes it easy and compelling for them to read and understand what your site is all about.
• Videos can increase conversion rates 80%.
• Bullets make big blocks of text easier to scan.
• Emphasized headlines may attract more attention than images.

Avoid the above mistakes and make your landing pages convert better. Meanwhile, WebCEO Online will help you bring visitors through SEO and organic search.

The post Things That Kill Your Landing Page Conversions appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.