Article Written by : Host Edition All SEO professionals and web developers rely on the same set of free and paid tools for keyword research. They all see the same results and ultimately end up targeting the same sets of keywords. This ends up in a stalemate of sorts as various sites compete for the same visitors. This does not devalue the results of these tools. However, it is better to take a different approach to establishing the top-level keywords to use as a basis for the search. Here are two customer-centric approaches to keyword research: Think like a customer Many customers think counter-intuitively when it comes to search. Their thought process is different to the business owner and that of the SEO professional. Let us look at an example of ordering flowers. The shop owner will think in terms of “order flowers online” or “order flowers online san Francisco”. The customer, on the other hand, might search for “best flowers for a funeral” or “how to say sorry with flowers”. Get into the mindset of the customer. Talk to customers Another approach is to ask the customer how they search and choose items online. This will also show the mindset of the customer in relation to your products and services. Operations that do not come across a customer in person can use email or popup forms to ask for information. Another valuable insight from this is to understand the type of language the customers...
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Article Written by : ADWORKS 24 Look at almost any search result for popular keywords and you will see that the sites that rank at the top are the biggest ones. Often, that is the ideal result for the search query. The Google algorithm does favor the larger sites over small ones, just from the sheer number of pages. We have seen that some smaller sites do outrank the larger ones. They manage to do it even for extremely popular keywords. Here are two ways a smaller site can outrank a much larger one: Method one – the long tail This strategy involves only chasing the long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are those that at least three words or more. To be classified as a long tail keyword, we are looking at five words on average. The reason the largest sites avoid these now is that they rely on the larger keyword pages to rank for the long tail automatically. However, a page optimized specifically for the long tail will outrank that page. Even though the traffic might seem much less, there are other linked searches for which traffic will come in. Method two – 10x content There is a concept in growth hacker circles called 10x content. These are large articles that are well written and comprehensive to every aspect of the subject matter. For example, a page that is targeting “best practices for job applicants” will need to tailor the content to cover the applicant, the HR manager, and even the HR director and each of their unique requirements from this...
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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 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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When a blog is started, often SEO is not of the top priorities. As a result SEO is neglected and then a lot of work has to be done later. This is harder when you have hundreds of older posts. The best way around this is to follow some best practices early on. Here are a three: On page SEO The best way to maintain quality content is to apply SEO to it after it is written. Do keyword research on the topics in your article and then try to apply related search phrases into the article. Use search terms in your headings subheadings and within the body. You can also modify the title to reflect common search terms. This way the link to the article will also contain the keywords, which is one of Google’s ranking signals. Encourage sharing Backlinks are still the most important method of ranking higher in search engines. One of the best ways to get backlinks is to make sure as many people see your articles. Encourage users to share the content with social sharing buttons and incentives. The more people that see and share your content, the more likely someone who has a blog is going to link to it. Incentives could be a free related pdf for those who share on a given social platform. Market the content This is a little more time consuming but has a high effort to reward ratio. Go to competing websites and find where they get links from. Contact those webmasters and ask them to consider linking to your article. This requires that your content is better than the one they are already linking...
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