Article Written by : Keywordle Does your business rely on phone calls for clients, leads, and customers? Then call tracking is going to a valuable marketing tool for you. What exactly is call tracking? It is the method of tracking the sources of your phone calls and matching it to conversions. This way you can generate a report on the effectiveness of any marketing channel. It works by assigning a different phone number that automatically forwards to your general business number. Different phone numbers are assigned to different marketing channels or campaigns. For example, a different number can be shown for a PPC campaign and another for organic traffic. Without call tracking, any business that relies on phone calls will not be able to accurately pinpoint the source of the lead. Call tracking allows marketers to link the incoming calls to a particular advertising channel, thereby measuring its efficiency. It can also allow for accurate ROI calculation for the said campaigns. This information can then be used to fund the most effective marketing channels and drop the ineffective ones. How does call tracking help SEO? Call tracking services are capable of matching a path to your landing page with the keyword. With this, the landing pages can be optimized for the keywords that are drawing in the calls. This, in turn, can also be used to optimize the pages with the highest conversion. With call tracking, you can learn what works best for your pages and that will lead to better...
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Article Written by : WM SEO How do you build and run the perfect website the way Google sees it? This has always been a tough question to answer. Until now. Thanks in large part to the various announcements that Google makes about changes to search, we can now build an image of what type of site will rank well in Google. Here is what they have said in the recent past: From the announcement post for Google Penguin, we get: “focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites”. Then from the link schemes page: “The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.”. Finally, from the webmaster guidelines, we get: “Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.” The message here is loud and clear. Google wants Quality in every aspect of the website. From the design to the content, it demands quality. This is not limited to the website itself. It wants you to get quality links, from quality websites to your quality content. The problem is most websites are built backward. People go looking for links before they have anything of quality. The message here is to build a site full of great content and then do your outreach. There are sites that update once every month or two but still rank high because they have hundreds of links. This is the type of quality Google is looking...
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Article by Pierrr Zarokian PPC, or “pay per click”, is an instantaneous way of getting consumers in front of your products and services. However, PPC campaigns are challenging. Tweaking them to run smoothly is an art. If you’re having trouble with your PPC campaign, here are a few tips to help get you on the right path. Know How to Scale Any digital ad agency will tell you: start your campaigns on a small budget to test the waters. Starting a campaign with a huge budget, not knowing what will convert, is a rookie mistake that could cost your business way more than what your were expecting. Increase the budget slowly after you know what’s generating leads and sales. Tracking It’s possible to run a campaign without tracking, but it’s nearly impossible to cut costs and increase profits without knowing what ads are getting clicks and conversions. A digital advertising agency will setup a tracking code for every campaign that they’re testing to see what ads attract clicks and what ads turn those clicks into leads and sales. So if you aren’t tracking your campaigns, you need to get started doing so today. Split Testing Getting into the habit of split testing ads to see which ad performs the best is another practice that digital agencies partake in to get the best results for their campaigns. When you find an ad that converts well, test another ad against it to try and increase your conversions even further. In time, you’ll see your daily ad spend start to drop and your income grow. Author’s Bio: Pierre Zarokian is a PPC and SEO digital marketing expert out of Los Angeles. He runs a Reputation Management Company called Reputation Stars. You can contact him from these links for further...
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Here are some key points brought up during the keynote at SMX by Google’s Gary Illyes: Authorship Google has completely stopped usage and display of authorship data. Although it has been a long time since the announcement, it has taken till now for it to be completely removed from the index. RankBrain He also said that you cannot optimize for RankBrain. He confirmed that it is a ranking factor, but one that does not have a score or a numerical figure associated with it. This ties in with the assumption that it is mostly used to optimize queries. Panda The panda update is continuous and slow. It can take months for the score assigned to each site by Panda to make it into the actual index and affect search results. Penguin Google is working on another penguin update but at this point there is no definite timeline on when its release can be expected. Mobile index He also talked about the mobile index that Google is still working on. It is meant to be a separate index only for mobile queries. At present both mobile and desktop searches are served by the same index. HTTPS One of the most interesting statistics to come out of this was that HTTPS within the Google index has now hit 34%. This is a huge jump from the single digits in the last few years. He recommends moving to HTTPS as quickly as...
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The accelerated mobile pages (AMP for short) standard by Google appears to be gaining traction with publishers. The standard, is meant to make pages smaller and reduce loading times. It achieves this in two ways. Firstly by narrowing down the technologies used and secondly by serving the pages from Google’s own servers. Here is a bit more detail from Wired: “To use AMP, you create an alternate version of your site that conforms to the specifications published by the AMP project. These standards are a lot like traditional HTML, but pared down to what Google considers to be the bare minimum. Typically you’ll give your AMP-optimized site a separate address, for example: yoursite.com/yourpage/amp. If you use WordPress, there’s actually a plugin will automatically create these alternate versions and help Google find them. But you could, theoretically, just replace your whole site with AMP optimized pages and it would still work in most modern web browsers, though it might be a bit drab.” Now it appears that more and more publishers are adopting the standard to serve on mobile devices. At Google IO 2016, Richard Gingras announced Google has indexed AMP pages on over 125 million documents from more than 640,000 domains across the web. In addition they also announced that updates to the Google Search app on both iOS and Android will now show AMP pages in the results. Recipes and other verticals will also start showing AMP pages by default wherever they...
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